a real day by day review of 4G service on EVO

[jonathanlc2005]

Testing Sprint's EVO 4G in 4G Country--Day One - Yahoo! News

 

[timlot]

If 4g was the only selling point to me this review would have some impact. I'm in a 4g city, Houston, and plan on enjoying a consistant at the very least 2mb and up experience vs barely 1mb I'm geting now with sprints evdo. But, even if you take 4g out of this phone its still a beast.

 

[Darth Duane]

Really more a review of Clearwire 4g than the EVO. Still useful information, just a bit of a misleading title .

 

[gibsonhtp#IM]

I'm basically at the point where the 4G is just a "bonus" for this device. 4G is still at its infancy and going to be a long while before it gets reliable enough.

 

[Adam Sawyer]

Holy Moses.. I wish I had the time and money to fly around the country checking the signal on my phone

 

[storino03]

Yep and when 4G is more widespread like EVDO is, there will be a handful of other 4G devices to move to.

 

[DirkBelig]

We're still in the trail-blazing phase of the game, folks. It's gonna be spotty, sparsely populated, and not immediately apparent what the point is in the early going; sort of like settling the untamed frontier.

But given time, it's going to be ubiquitous and unrecognizable compared to its infancy. It's like driving the Interstate where there were once two parallel ruts worn by Westward wagon traffic. And we'll be the grumpy old timers telling the young'uns about the time when 4G was something you had to travel to find, uphill in the snow, both ways.

 

[turtle3#AC]

Another thing to consider is he went to some of the first cities to get Clearwire. I was told by some Clearwire workers here in Kansas City that the original markets were hit so hard with new clients that Clear actually stopped promoting the service to manage capacity adequately.

They went into some interesting details about "how" each city is rolled out and that it is in the roadmap to have 3 phases in each city. Right now Clear is doing Phase 1 in each city they cover, and then moving to new cities to get everyone covered before rolling into Phases 2 and 3. That's not to say the footprint is small in phase 1, but maybe less concentrated to start. After getting most cities covered they will come back and add more antennae to increase network capacity and coverage.

Also, they mentioned that extensive monitoring of usage statistics is done to determine which antennae are used the most vs. less. This is likely more important for the in-home users than the phones/laptops that are pinging all around the city. But they said that analyses are done and "antennae power can be increased....to start we keep them low to assess load, then we can ramp them up later as we know which ones need higher strength. It extends the life of the technology".

So be cautious how you interpret this guys' article. The workers I spoke with came from Houston and said they were getting 11.2mps down on their laptop dongles. I posted in the Carriers forum a speed test that the guys ran right in front of me that got 5.63mps down and 3.39 up. Just sayin....results will vary a lot in these early phases....but keep those wagons rolling because soon they'll pave a HWY and we'll all be loving it!

 

[sel1965]

We have clearwire here in KC and in midtown Waldo area get as much as 7 download. So I'm not worried about speed at all, I just can't wait to get the damn phone in my hands.

 

[2CupsWithString]

Thanks for the review of 4G. I agree with others that it is more of a starting point, that being said, it'd be nice to see a noticeable difference.

I wonder if they're already working on revisions to the 4G spec and/or keeping an eye on LTE.

 

[NokiaNokia]

The problem with Sprint's or Clear's 4G is that its using 2.1GHz frequency. The LTE will be 700MHz. LTE will kick Wimax's ass.

 

[xorg]

The problem with Sprint's or Clear's 4G is that its using 2.1GHz frequency. The LTE will be 700MHz. LTE will kick Wimax's ass.

LTE will be better in coverage off the bat but the challenge is very high speeds at 700Mhz. There's more interference at 700Mhz than at 2.5Ghz. VZW is showing speeds of 8Mbps for LTE but those were controlled tests. Will be interesting to see real world tests from users. The 2.5Ghz has challenges with indoors but MIMO antennas will eventually help that when more broadly used.

The other factors is that Sprint/Clear 4G is unlimited and if they go with caps, it will likely be comparable to cable industry, not 3G as they are competing with low end cable. VZW already said LTE will not be offered unlimited and you pay for buckets of data.