Thunderbolts 3g radio question.

[Maverik]

Just wondering if the thunderbolts 3g reception is better than that of former verizons phones? I live on the border of 4g/3g coverage map so I'm prepping myself for the phone to read 3g most of the time.

I have a jailbroken 3gs and with 2-3 bars I pick up about 2-3mbps down. Think the thunderbolt will be able to at least match the speeds if the case is I'm mainly pulling 3g?

Btw it's the extended network that I border. I really do not know what extended network implies for my signal picking up abilities.

 

[Maverik]

Man it's hard to get a question answered around here.

 

[Hosehead]

Wow, you waited a whole 4 hours,,,

Patient, are we?

 

[Maverik]

Lawl. Thanks for the amazingly informative response.

 

[trjnberry]

I was in the process of answering your question much earlier, but had to break for an appointment and never got back to writing until now. I have my phone on 3G most of the time to save the battery life. I do live in a 4G area, but the house I am living in doesn't have a strong 4G signal, so I just leave it on 3G. Dong a bandwith test on speedtest.net, my phone's speed is 1.23 mps down, 0.28 mbs up with a 218 ms ping. My phone's browser settings are set to desktop urls only, so I am not using the speedtest app for the test. Speakeay.com's speedtest shows 0.96 mps down, 0.26 mbs up with no ping mentioned. My Bolt fluctuates based on location and what speedtest you use to determine speed. I haven't seen anywhere near 2-3 mbs down for the 3G on the Thunderbolt in my usage. Using the same deskop web urls on my phone when using 4G, I have gotten over 15 mbs up and 2-4+ mbs down. Battery life doesn't last long on 4G with a stock battery, though.

I don't think you're going to beat ATT or any other GSM network speed with 3G on Verizon. I think with the 3G network version that the Thunderbolt uses, you will get the same time data and voice feature that GSM offers, but you won't get faster speeds.. in my observations. You'll need the 4G for the faster network.

 

[Maverik]

Thanks for the info! Looks like I might only have the thunderbolt for a few hours if I cannot get the LTE service in my home. I appreciate the response.