Verizon states that with lte they are getting less then 30 ms latency and also 700 mhz transmission .which they say gives better building penetration.
How important is latency when it comes to the user experience ?
I'm getting around 300 ms with 3g and between 420-450 ms with 4g.
Can our 4g get any better or is once the area is completed it is what it is ?
What about building penetration ?
and Finally..not to knock Sprint but I wish they would get off the" Being 1st campaign", it just doesn't cut it in the telecom/tech industry im0.
700 MHz is a better band to be on than 2.5 GHz but there's a realpolitik issue here too. Verizon is basically stuck in a 10+10 MHz configuration - they're using frequency division duplexing (that is, of their 20 MHz a 10 MHz band is dedicated for forward channel and a 10 MHz band is dedicated for reverse channel - when downloading you're only going to be able to use 10 MHz). They don't have much room in many markets to expand the bands that they're using.
Clear has 120 MHz of spectrum between 2.5 and 2.6 GHz and in some markets has 150 MHz of spectrum available. With that they can do several possible things - for example increase the spectrum used to 40 MHz and allow many more bits to be used for error correction, the in-building gain that they will see from that will likely be better than the advantage they would have had if they were on a 700 MHz band at 10 MHz.
However, it looks like what they're actually planning on doing based on the trials they are conducting now is very interesting - they have so much spectrum available that they're (probably) going to use three radio technologies. The high end of the spectrum they'll keep with WiMax or perhaps increase the spectrum used from the current 10 MHz to 20 MHz.
Then in the remainder of the spectrum they'll have LTE running in FDD (frequency division duplexing, like verizon) mode and in a lower part of the spectrum still they'll have LTE running in TDD (time division duplexing).
They haven't announced this of course, this is just what I suspect they're planning on doing based on the trials that they're currently doing.
Given the relationship Sprint has with Clear, it's not unreasonable to suspect that in the future we'll see wimax + LTE (at 2.5 GHz) multimode phones.
t-mobile seems to be planning to move to dual carrier HSPA+ next year as well, which will then be using 10 MHz spectrum (rather than 5 MHz as it currently is) and theoretically top out at 42 MBit/sec. This is also at fairly high frequencies (1900 and 2100 MHz bands) and I'm not too sure what in-building performance would actually be like.
The latency advantage is not because of LTE using a 700 MHz band but rather because it is LTE. On a phone I doubt you'll actually ever notice the difference unless real time gaming becomes popular on phones. It is more of an issue for using modem sticks in laptops though, I suppose.
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