criggs
join:2000-07-14
New York, NY Reviews:
 ·Millenicom
2 edits | reply to jgfrase
said by jgfrase:Officialy not till December Speeds not that great 09-11-2010 08:27 AM flash speedtest 3067 Kbps 976 Kbps Sprint (Chicago IL) spcsdns.net I regret to tell you this, but that is actually the official Sprint speeds now for 4G. I spoke to their Technical Support folks and asked what the official specs were now. The person gave me a bunch of blather, obviously crap being pulled out of his ass, so I asked to speak to someone in Advanced Technical Support.
I was transferred to someone else who WASN'T Advanced Technical Support. Same deal, same blather, same, er, source, etc. etc.
So this time I let him have it. I quoted the average specs EXACTLY for 3G EVDO Rev A (many of you know it, with the 350k floor for the upload speed and the 600k floor for the download speed, and so on), and said I wanted them to read me, not tell me, READ me, the equivalent specs for the current Sprint 4G rollout in the latest cities, like New York and so on.
The person said "Oh, only Advanced Technical Support would have that" to which I replied "I know, which is why I've asked for them twice now!"
Long hold. Finally a woman got on, name of Christine, who identified herself as Advanced Technical Support. She read me the specs, and they were obviously the stuff I was looking for. My regrets for having forgotten the average ceiling for the current Sprint 4G download, but the floor was 3 mbps.
And for upload, she said the average speed was 500k to 1m, and she said flat out (she must not have gotten the memo about lying about this stuff) that the upload speed was capped at 1meg.
I thanked her very much and said good-bye.
Folks, it's official: Sprint 4G WiMax upload isn't going to be moving faster than 1 meg per second in the new cities, and that's that.
All of which means that your speed in Denver, jgfrase? That's what you got and that's what you're gonna get. By their current specs, your 4G connection is working within spec.
Like I say, my regrets, but that's the name of that tune.
Having said that, I gotta say, my current Sprint 4G WiMax experience in New York has not been bad. Yes, the upload speed is a bit of a disappointment, but I've been experiencing NONE of the fluctuations in speed that were a regular part of the 3G experience, even when I had a good connection.
It was not at all unusual to have my 3G download speed fluctuate as much as 300k per second plus or minus in the course of the day. I usually had a download speed of 1100k, with dips down to 800 and peaks up to 1400.
But so far, after a week, my 4G speed has been rock-steady, with 4.48 megs per second download and 880k per second upload.
To me, these speeds are a lot of fun, even if they're not as high as they could be. The bottom line is that it appears to be reliable, and it's unlimited, which makes it the best deal around, -- for now, until the LTE providers get their heads out of their you-know-what and offer unlimited, or at least a reasonable cap, like 20gigs.
By the way, I read somewhere (forget where, but maybe someone here will remember) that the average user now downloads 14 gigs a month. By those standards, it is not those of us who want higher caps than 10 gigs who are being unreasonable; it is the companies who are still offering 5 gigs, and, rarely, 10 gigs, who are being completely obtuse.
My two cents. |
