Wireless / Mobile > Sprint Mobile Broadband > April Sprint 4G Wimax Speeds

April Sprint 4G Wimax Speeds

And here from not-so-sunny Sunnyvale, CA.

Thanks to you, criggs, I finally knew where to look for that almost invisible forum copy button.

Fantabuloso!! Glad to be of help.

And here's what I'm getting today:

I have been getting very bumpy results in the last week. My CINR went down to 10-14 from 20-24. I'm not sure what happened but I was hoping it would be temporary. My Rx Power remains the same from -60 to -66 which is about 3-4bars. I placed my usb docking bay for the modem outside my window and got an rx power of -50 which is 5bars and still had a CINR of 13.
»www.speedtest.net/result/1234570356.png

I get anything from 1mbps-6mbps with an upload of a consistent 1mbps. I cant stream HD anymore from hulu or netflix without getting lag.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Just idle speculation, and I could be all wet.

You say your signal strength has remained roughly the same, but your noise level has gotten worse. So could that have been brought about by an additional tower that was turned on and is interfering with your old tower?

How's this therefore for a real off-the-wall suggestion: Can you stick the modem somewhere where the signal is WEAKER?? I'm thinking maybe that placement might have the effect of attenuating the signal from that additional tower, if one exists, and could therefore improve your signal/noise ratio.

Edit: I read in another thread that someone got very good results improving his speed by adjusting his RWIN using the tool available on this site, DrTCP. If you have an operating system that predates Vista, like XP or ME, that adjustment might also help you. End Edit.

Also, a small technical point with regard to your posted result from Speedtest. At the moment, it's just sitting there like a lox, with no one being able to read it unless they click the link to load up the image. That's not your fault because Speedtest left out a proper Forum Copy link in their magnificent wonderful redesign a few weeks ago -- not.

However I am pleased to report that Speedtest has FINALLY implemented a Forum Copy link, though it's not very user-friendly. When you click the Share Your Result link DO NOT click the COPY link. Instead you first need to click the super-tiny, almost-invisible, FORUM link right above the URL/COPY graphic. After clicking that THEN you can click the COPY link and you will get a usable graphic that you can post here and which others can view. I suggest you might want to do that with your speed result postings from now on. It will make your messages more readable and more informative.

Yes, Speedtest's implementation of this Forum Copy link is lame (their old design was LOADS better). But at least they have the function again.

Morning, racing fans. Here's my speed today:

It doesn't seem like I'm going nearly this though. Feels like 100kbps - 300 kbps

That's odd. IN that case, may I suggest a real world test?

These speed tests are only very brief snapshots in time, and don't reflect what you can do on a sustained basis for several minutes, which is where I suspect you may be seeing a discrepancy.

When I'm not sure of the accuracy of these speedtests, I go to an official file download site to see what the speed is in a real world situation.

One to which I'm particularly partial is Star Trek: Farragut, a Trek fan video series, which is free to all and from which downloads are actively encouraged as a means of promotion. Their best download site is »farragut.novelhost.net/ . Once you're there, I suggest you try downloading one of the multi-gig .iso files there. The needle will swing a bit back and forth for the first five minutes or so, but then it will settle into a groove and you'll get a fairly accurate picture of your effective download speed. After watching it for about ten minutes, I normally just interrupt and terminate the download, satisfied that I've received a representative real-world sample of my download speed.

In my case, it normally settles down to sedate wobbling between 7 and 8 mbps, obviously slightly above Sprint's quoted average spec of 3 to 6 mbps, so I am obviously happy at the moment. Let's see what it does with your connection.

One note of clarification: many download clocks give figures in KiloBytes instead of kilobits. So you will need to take the figure you see and multiply by 8 in order to get something that relates logically to the mbps figure. For example, if you see a download speed of 500 KB as opposed to 500 kb, that means that you're actually downloading at about 4 mbps (500 times 8 is 4000, you see).

reply to criggs


Alvin, TX

Hey, not bad. I normally don't get anywhere near that, though I rarely get anything that isn't at least above Sprint's maximum average spec of 6 mbps.

One peculiarity of your reading above: It says your provider is Clearwire, even though you're a Sprint subscriber, not a Clear subscriber. I wonder why that's happening with your test.

In any event, here's what I'm getting today:

reply to criggs
Under Ideal conditions: (right as I am near the tower as I head into work)

reply to criggs

reply to bluepoint951

And today here's what I'm getting:

reply to criggs


Here is today's speed. I am currently downloading a large file and the speed reads 13.3 Mbps so in my case, Speedtest is close to real world.

As for the "Clear" designation, it has always been that way. I do not suffer from capping like I did when I had a Clear account.

While I have read many anecdotal indications that Clear is worse than Sprint in terms of throttling, yours is the first account I've comes across where one has experienced Clear throttling, then switched to Sprint IN THE SAME LOCATION and experienced clear (npi!) sailing.

At some point, the reason for this difference, if there is a difference, will be revealed, I suspect. And my gut tells me it is NOT related to the size of the subscriber base. Whatever.

Anyway, here's what I'm getting today:

reply to criggs
Hi all, I've been reading through these threads studying up on 4g wimax speeds and evaluating the performance of the networks.

I wanted to point out one thing that I've not seen mentioned much, which is that a Speedtest.net COMPETES WITH any other data transfer going on.

For example, if you're streaming video while running the Speedtest.net speed test, the bandwidth used by the video stream will be missing from the Speedtest.net results.

It's necessary to STOP ALL NETWORK ACTIVITY before running the speed test to get an accurate measurement.

Many applications do background transfers (automatic updates, for example) so it's not always obvious when your computer is using up bandwidth.

Thanks, and keep up the great work. These threads are a valuable resource!

In that regard, I HATE Windows 7. On my old Windows XP computer, which I still have, the connection icon in the startup tray lights up like a Christmas tree when data is flowing, and goes dark when it is not. I was always able to wait until it was dark before running a speed test in order to make sure that my connection's bandwidth was otherwise unused.

But the Windows 7 icon offers NO SUCH INDICATION. So basically it's just guesswork.

If anyone knows how to configure Windows 7 so that the startup tray's connection icon lights up and turns off as data flows and does not flow, PLEASE lay it on me. I could sure use it.

Thanks!

Whoops, I almost forgot. Here's what I'm getting today:

reply to criggs

And here's what I'm getting today: