Sprint Launches 11 More LTE Markets → Re: Numbers game...

Far northwest Fort Worth on Loop 620, on a rare occasion I see 5 Mbps, but usually less than 3 Mbps...and more than often, it drops to half speed one third of the way through the speed test. Sunday afternoon 4G was 800 Kbps and 3G was only 200 Kbps.

The point of my original post, though, was to state that a large amount of cities in the DFW region have LTE service without Sprint saying explicitly that they do.

I was actually just in northwest FW (North Richland Hills) a few days ago and I was getting about 29mbps down. Pretty good.

Other times, it's lower, about 9 or so - but I've never seen 3mbps on LTE around there with Sprint. I've only had this iPhone 5 for a week, but I did a lot of driving and took note of speeds. They were almost always great. 3G is, of course, garbage lol.

Either the tower you're connecting to is two far away or is not completely upgraded and approved by Sprint. Sprint LTE should yield 37/18 Mbit/s (up/down) with full signal.

Which phone do you have? If you're looking at bars to show what signal you've got, they're dead wrong. You have to go into field test mode (##DEBUG#, passcode SPRINT) to get real readings. -90 dBm RSRP is good. -100 is okay. -110 is bad.

Correction: Sprint LTE theoretically supports 37/18 with full signal. Realistically, if you're the only one on the tower sector and have full signal, 36/14 is doable (I've been in this situation). Real-world speeds with good signal will realistically be half that.

Oh yeah with a loaded network everything will drop to half but half is still pretty damn amazing especially with how consistent the latency has been on Sprint's LTE network. With latency below 60ms in most cases I don't think anyone can complain about the network. Unless they're out in a field in the middle of Kansas trying to have a pissing contest with Verizon's or AT&T's LTE network. But even then the latency will be a big factor in performance. You can have 70 Mbit/s (probably not even that specifically due to latency) of throughput but with 150+ms latency you're not going to be able to enjoy it much at all. AT&T has done better than Verizon with latency but in a lot of areas they're still pretty high up there.

Depends on where you are. I've seen 50-70ms latency consistently with Verizon these days. Sprint has been lower, but the connection speed and low jitter on VZW means that you don't really notice a difference, all else equal, unless you're gamin0 (which I do)g, and maybe not even then.

There are quite a few places where I have seen consistently high latency on Verizon's network one of which would be here in Cleveland. Latency sits around 125ms+ and speeds never really surpass 12/3 Mbit/s. It's about as bad as using 3G to browse the web. Even though you have good download speeds you still have high latency which makes web browsing feel sluggish. If Sprint can one up Verizon here I wouldn't be surprised. Clearwire WiMAX is already better than Verizon LTE here. Sprint seems to have consistently low latency all around the country with very little variation.

What does a traceroute look like out of CLE? I know that for awhile Verizon was hauling LTE traffic in Denver out to Seattle before doing anything useful with it. I imagine that the issue is similar where you are.

T-Mobile is actually quite good about this, as is CricKet; since neither have national backbone networks, they'll just dump traffic onto the Internet at the nearest large city.

I can't check on Verizon right now, as my mom is the one with Verizon LTE and getting her phone from her for 5 seconds to run a traceroute will be like pulling teeth, but I can try and grab one later on today.

I wouldn't doubt Verizon is doing something ridiculous with traffic before it hits the internet from here. Verizon shouldn't have any problems putting in a LTE core here. Sprint has managed to do it just fine, eHRPD is already up and running in CLE.

It seems like everything from CLE on Sprint's network goes to CAK and gets dumped onto the internet. Latency from CLE to CAK is ~5ms on my home internet (it should be much lower for fiber). This should mean that latency on Sprint's LTE should sit around 25-30ms for local sites and 35-50ms for everything from the east coast to Kansas.

I completely agree with this. A smartphone only needs a few Mbps. After that, latency matters more to app performance. Bloggers and speedqueens don't seem to understand latency impacts app/web performance. Sprint is winning when it comes to latency partly because they have more sites closer together.

Well there's latency over the air-link but that's likely minimal. Having sites closer together will reduce latency there. But also having less people on each tower will reduce latency from cell load.

Yup, and because Sprint sites are closer together, there are fewer users per site. And of course Sprint has half the users of ATT/VZW.