Slashdot Mirror
AT&T and Verizon LTE Networks Compared
adeelarshad82 writes "AT&T launched a speedy 4G LTE network in five cities on Sunday, and the question that comes to mind is how it compares to Verizon Wireless' 4G LTE system. Well, according to the eight rounds of testing conducted in Houston, Texas, Verizon may have something to worry about. Downloads over the AT&T network averaged about 24Mbps and peaked at 42.85Mbps, the fastest cellular connection seen to date. Just as interesting as the sheer download speeds were the connection quality results: Pingtest.net generally rated the network an A or a B, good enough for video chat or gaming."
Reliable, consistent wifi suitable for gaming and deployed across a broad area would certainly be a welcome development... MW2 over mobile broadband?
Alas... my experience with wireless networks is that they tend to vary wildly in their throughput, their reliability (especially in regards to dropped or delayed packets) and, especially here in Australia, their cost. Most sub $100 mobile broadband plans have less than 10gb a month. And that's over 3G; an upgrade to 4G would have to bring with it significant cost savings to make it worthwhile down here.
A fair few areas don't have reliable 3G access anyway. 4G is a long way away for us... gah.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
So now I can hit my 5 GB cap in less than 30 minutes. Hurray!
Wait until there are actually people using the network before taking any results seriously.
We all know how well AT&T handles lots of phones on their network (NYC).
There is no point in providing fiber optic connections to everyone's home, when such insanely fast speeds are achievable over the cellular network.
How well does it perform when moving at 30mph and 60mph? So what if it works good an a stationary device on a network with very few users, that does not mean that it will work good with more users or while moving.
Verizon's network has been live for quite a while now and there's a decent number of customers actively using it. I would wager there wasn't many other AT&T customers sharing resources when these tests were conducted, but on Verizon's there was.
I'll be curious to see these tests repeated in six months, a year, etc.
(NOTE: not a Verizon fan... I'm with Sprint... just pointing out the obvious).
Am I the only person completely unexcited by 4G given the bandwidth limit to speed ratio?
On either Verizon or AT&T one can easily swallow up the entire 200/250MB lower tier limit in a matter of minutes. The 2GB higher end plan is a mere hours of airtime away. What happens when some rogue app or website pushes you well over the edge? Is this the texting overage nightmare ripe for abuse again? How the hell can you game on this kind of network with such low limits?
4G/LTE means nothing if the bandwidth limits are so paltry as to effectively make it a metered service.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Just-activated network that only works with a handful of just-released devices is surprisingly fast and uncongested. Film at eleven.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Houston TX is no New York City.
I still have no bars... how did you do this test?
I am sure there are very little users that have 4g with Verizon. I am sure that helps the results
So maybe ATT customers can use 4G to talk instead of the voice network which always drops your calls?
Pretty sure there is no cap on 4G, or at least that's what I remember from when I was shopping for data cards a few months ago. (I never got anything because they all required money to be exchanged, the bastards.)
My T-mobile Nexus S works great with video chat over 3G. That's a pretty poor way to describe its capabilities, in my opinion. As long as the video latency is under a couple of seconds, video chat is usable. Gaming is a better one, but be more specific. I can play poker over Edge without any issues.
Since AT&T allegedly launched this "on Sunday" (from TFS), not a few months ago, I'm not sure why you'd presume your knowledge applies to AT&T's terms of service?
Smithers fire the engineer that made this possible and the person who let it slip out.
The masses will be demanding this type of thing now and well be hard pressed to come up
with a plausible reason that we have to price it just out of their reach.
From the article:
Of course, we're comparing a loaded Verizon network full of Droid Bionics and HTC Thunderbolts to a brand-new AT&T system just out of the wrapping paper.
Fact is, AT&T has screwed up, without exception, every single aspect of my life they've managed to touch. I had their cable service for a little while when my former provider sold out to AT&T. Fortunately, I moved shortly after that. Their residential phone service is woefully expensive. Their cellular service cuts out consistently, and I can barely get a signal (which is an improvement that only happened in the last two years--before that, I was SOL trying to use my company-issued AT&T phone) where I work in downtown Atlanta. I had 1.5 Mbps DSL at my house, as they didn't have any speed faster than that, until I figured out one day that Comcast had 16 Mbps service for a lower price.
Right now, AT&T has exactly zero--zero--LTE smartphones on its network, so yeah, I don't doubt it's fast. I simply do not trust the network to hold up to a real-life data load, though, so no thanks.
The question that comes to my mind is when the hell are they going to improve service availability. In my major city's metropolitan area you can drop calls all over the place. Coverage is full of huge gaping holes, some of them a decade old. Out of town, along the interstates, calls drop like flies as 3G to Edge and back handoffs fail like so many stimulus plans. When coverage IS available the oversold bandwidth is filled to capacity often enough that "Call Failed" with 4 bars of coverage is commonplace.
Don't tell us how blazing fast your network is. Hell even a terabit connection ain't shit if it's less reliable than a cage full of messenger squirrels.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
> averaged about 24Mbps and peaked at 42.85Mbps
So can we please STOP calling it 4G?
Granted, I don't expect the people who work for at&t and verizon to be anything other than lying sacks of crap. But shouldn't a site that bills itself as "news for nerds" strive for better?
Imagine all the people...
PCMag's work made for a useful location-specific test, but it's still lacking in details. Specifically, how wide are the channels AT&T and Verizon are using in that area? If AT&T is using wider channels then of course they're going to have more bandwidth*, but because channel widths are location specific (AT&T and Verizon don't have the same allocations everywhere), it's entirely non-representative if AT&T or Verizon's channel widths were significantly different from the national average.
* If the T-Mo merger does go through, this will be one of the big benefits for AT&T: they will be able to put together wider channels at lower frequencies
Sure, when there are ~5000 or so people using the entire AT&T 4G network, in a pathetic handful of cities, you'll get great speed. Under full and prolonged deployment, I guarantee it will drop significantly. If you want a real test of "who's better", compare the networks *under the same load* instead of just a side-by-side of a one-day-old network with virtually no users versus a months-old network with a huge user base.
No matter how much AT&T pushes, they will always fall behind Verizon because they don't invest properly in infrastructure, their pricing model is even more of a joke than other carriers, and their customer service makes Verizon look like the Ritz.
I just wish I could stay with Verizon after my unlimited plan expires in April. Guess it will be Sprint after that, unless VZW goes back to an unlimited plan. Fuck paying $30/month for 2GB...I could buy and mail a shitload more bandwidth than that using hard drives/key drives/whatever for a lot less money.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Exactly. Assume the 250MB cap. At the 24Mbps quoted in TFS, that's 2 minutes.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Wow. Totally and completely wrong, PA. Either they cap the amount of data you can move and charge for overages or they cut your speed in order to "manage the network". A while back, sprint claimed they neither limited data volume or cut speed but I'm sure they have some other "clever" way to restrict the flow of data. People who had unlimited Verizon plans prior to Julyish of this year can keep their unlimited data plan but only for phone data. Tethering has had a 5 gig limit for years and it's carried over into Verizon's 4G service.
It's really pathetic how these companies advertise all of the data-heavy things you can do with their new phones then they spank you like a child if you have the nerve to actually use those services.
Exactly. Assume the 250MB cap. At the 24Mbps quoted in TFS, that's 1 hour 23 minutes minutes.
FTFY, speeds are measured in Megabits, cap in Megabytes, 1 Megabyte = 8 Megabits.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
...with LTE-Advanced. ATT is JUST NOW getting in the game. I remember when Verizon first dropped LTE. It rated much higher then as well, what with no devices or users clogging the network. All the while, Verizon has been rolling LTE and devices out like mad, nation wide. And in the background, they have been working on LTE-Advanced, which will take speeds, and more importantly, latency far beyond what their current LTE can provide. Add to this that it's a simple upgrade on there part to roll it out, and they will easily leapfrog ATT before they can even get close to Verizon's current LTE coverage.
It's 1 minute 23 seconds.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8&q=250+MB+%2F+24+Mbps
This argument is always made anytime mention is made of metered Internet plans, whether wired or wireless. The argument is "since I can exhaust this quota by downloading at the stated maximum of 'x' Mbps in 'y' hours, it's useless, and they should really only advertise it as being a 'z' kbps plan" (where 'z' is the bitrate that would be required to exhaust the given download quota in one month).
I don't buy that argument. My home internet connection is fast, and I would buy a faster connection if one was available, but I choose to pay only for a 30 GB download quota on it. Note that I say "choose to" - higher quota plans are available to me (up to 1 TB metered, or unlimited), but I don't need that much data, so I save a bit of money by just paying for 30 GB/month. The fact that, at my line speed, I could consume that 30 GB in a few hours if I so desired, is irrelevant to me. I don't need that much data ... but when I DO need/want something, I want it FAST. If the speed of my plan doubled tomorrow, it wouldn't make much difference to the amount I download. But it would mean I would only have to wait half as long when I did download. Which is good.
( NB. I'm not saying this applies to everyone. There are people with internet usage patterns out there that consume every bit of bandwidth available to them 24/7, and thus would start consuming a lot more if the speed was higher. I have friends who torrent everything under the sun just because they can, even though they will probably never get around to listening to/watching half of it. But for me? I download the stuff I want - that stuff happens to average out to 25-30 GB a month, so the 30 GB plan suits me. For 10 bucks extra per month I can upgrade to 100 GB ... so as my data requirements grow (which they will over time as the quality of downloaded media and size of software increases), I can just upgrade my plan as required. But that has nothing to do with ~speed~. I want as much of that as possible, even if I only have a small download limit. )
You can use 5GB no problem. Having had 4G for awhile now I don't mind it, but it doesn't excite me at all. It is nice to have things load rather quickly on the phone, all the things I did before like get e-mail and so on happen much faster, more like a wired connection. However the idea that I'd be able to use it for all sorts of new tasks, or as a replacement to my cable modem is stupid. The 5GB limit means that all I'm going to do with it is what I do now: Get e-mail, download apps, check things on the web if I'm not near a PC (like in a store or something) and that's about it. I'm not going to stream a movie to it.
Until they get real about bandwidth limits, 4G is going to be a nice toy but not really any more useful than 3G. It just lets you get things done a little faster.
This is going to undo mods.. but WTF does your home connection have to do with peoples phones' connections?
That 30GB is 15 times what the average phone user gets, so if your tethering, you only get 1/15th the data you would at home. Then if you go over at home its what a dollar a gig? With phones its a hell of a lot more expensive. Its ten dollars a gig.
Your capped home plan has little to do with a caped cell plan. and 2gb is a hell of a lot less data then the 30 you use at home. Capped at 30gig might just suit you fine, but 2gb isnt really that much data a month.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
If I had mod points I would mark this down for stupidity.
You are great at the bits vs bytes but not at the minutes vs seconds.
Mbp s stands for Megabits Per Second, not Megabits Per Minute.
As quoted above 250MB is ~2000Mbits. Throw in network noise, congestion, and the pedantic arguments of Mega vs Megi and you're looking at something in the neighborhood of 90 seconds. If you're going to be that guy who corrects people's math, maybe you should double check and make sure you have yours right so next time you don't look like a giant tool.
Well maybe in the US. Over here in Europe we have seen speeds up to 90 Mbit/s over 4G(LTE) for quite some while. This article that compares different 4G networks in Sweden from January this year sheds some light (it's in Swedish but the graphs are readable): http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.364964/de-har-snabbast-4g
250MB =~ 2000Mb, : : 2000Mb / 24Mb/s = 83s or about 1.5 minutes.
I'm currently on the "unlimited" plan but for demo lets say I'm bumped down to 2GB plan, that ends up being a little over 11 minutes if at constant use.
I was looking forward to the new iPhone to have a 4G connection as ATT is ramping that up in my area this fall. Now I'm not so sure since I could easily be over a cap in less than a day into the month. Granted usage won't be all at once and I doubt the speeds will hold with actual customers using it, but the faster the pipe, the more usage it will get. AT&T needs to up their data plans or prepare to t-off a lot of customers b/c of continual overages.
Although one bright spot to 4G, if the speeds hold, is steadily increasing competition to cable/dsl internet. If I can tether my phone and get those speeds, or use a hotspot for cheaper, cable is going to have to up the game for my home network.
Isn't that hilarious?
"You have excelled in speed, now use it fast because yo' cap ain't gonna last more than a couple o' minutes."
I guess I can pull up the weather maps and check the daily forecast to stay under my limit; it will pop up faster than it did before. Wooooowwwwwwwww.
/sarcasm
I recently upgraded my ATT phone to an HTC Inspire 4G. It says 4G right in the name. However, its 4G is HSPA+, not LTE. I understand that HSPA+ is not the same as LTE (and that HSPA+ really isn't 4G even though they are labeling it as such), but how will ATT explain/spin that even though the phone has a 4G symbol on it, it doesn't work on the 4G network.
I wonder how the companies with these ridiculous caps will promote the next technology... "blaze through your data cap in no time with our new technology..." I always argued that data caps would become a problem, and made room for companies to put users in a tight spot and charge them more money... now its going to start to show as things progress from here. I still believe that any company promoting high speeds with data caps should be regulated and forced to follow strict pricing guidelines.. of course that will never happen... if you cant support a network at speeds you claim uncapped, or at least more reasonably, then you just shouldn't offer it.
AT&T has said the average user of its home DSL system consumes 18GB per month. At current rates, that would run $180/month for LTE wireless service.
AT&T phone and DSL is on average $90/month. So you get two times the cost, the same amount of usage, used in a fraction of the time. Awesome! Cant wait to dodge that deal.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Oh agreed. What I was saying was merely that "more speed without an increase in download limit" isn't necessarily a bad thing (in general - this applies to any connection, home, mobile, or whatever).
If your mobile connection was your only connection, then yes, that would suck. :)
Downloads over the AT&T network averaged about 24Mbps and peaked at 42.85Mbps, the fastest cellular connection seen to date.
The first mention I found of an actual download speed for the LTE network in Stockholm (you know, the world's first publicly available LTE-service) beats that figure easily, peaking at 59.1 Mb/s. That is a measurement from over a year ago.
We JUST got AT&T 3g service in my town this August. I think they only put it in because their EDGE-only stuff got damaged in a storm.
Thank God I'm grandfathered into unlimited... Otherwise, what a waste.
Go study.