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D/L MUCH slower than U/L? What causes this?

My Sprint HTC One is a great phone, and I'm normally in a good 4G area with D/L speed in the 2-20Mbit range. But at my desk, where I spend most of my time, speed is all over the place. I just did three speedtests, at the same spot, and here's what it showed:

#1 9/10/13 4:39pm - 43kbps D/L 109kbps U/L 408ms Ping

#2 9/10/13 5:01pm - 5059kbps D/L 955kbps U/L 97ms Ping

#3 9/10/13 5:04pm - 6954kbps D/L 1279kbps U/L 54ms Ping

And a lot of times it fails altotether to connect to speedtest.net, I get "Finding Closest Server" until it times out.

Just curious, what could account for those wild swings in performance?

update your PRL and Profile

Mainly, shared use of the channel. If you were the only user, your speeds and pings would be very consistent from the same location. Note that your pings go up when your speed goes down. That is a sure sign of congestion on the channel. Effectively, you are waiting your turn in queue.

This is the big downside of wireless, that we share the same fixed capacity across, zero, one, or dozens and more users at the same time. The operators add more capacity when the lines are saturated, provided they have the spectrum (that is, more licensed channels available) in that market.

That makes sense. I've updated PRL and Profile, and have the latest versions of all the system software and Android. It just varies a lot in speed. And if it's just bandwidth available, that would explain why U/L isn't getting as hammered, because there is still bandwidth for U/L since there isn't as much U/L activity at any one time.