LTE speed change with iPhone 5 release

[giper54]

I am interested to see how the arrival of the iPhone 5 has affected the speed of the LTE network. If you have before and after numbers please post. Also is anyone experiencing network problems with the increased LTE users?

 

[JHBThree]

Mine hasn't changed at all, and I'm in a suburb where iphones rule the roost. People are forgetting too easily that LTE was specifically designed to be able to cope with a huge number of users without big drops in speed.

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[anon62607]

Mine hasn't changed at all, and I'm in a suburb where iphones rule the roost. People are forgetting too easily that LTE was specifically designed to be able to cope with a huge number of users without big drops in speed.

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Now that is something of an interesting comment. How is it that LTE is designed for large numbers of users any more than EVDO is, for example?

I can imagine situations in which LTE would be worse than WCDMA and evdo, too, such as fairly high in a building or when near cell edge from two or more towers when the network is loaded and the adjacent towers are unable to shift resource block utilization to avoid co-interference.

Also, with no idea if it is related to iphone LTE devices, speed tests on verizon lte in portland this Saturday have been noticeably slower than normal and slower than I'd yet seen on LTE.

At the end of the day, there was twice as much, or more, evdo spectrum than there is LTE spectrum in most markets and it's pretty difficult to imagine that iPhones will not impact end user observed network performance at some point, barring increased tower density with smaller cells or something to that effect.

Anyway, you can do the experiment yourself, find a time in the middle of the night when the network is relatively unloaded and get a few devices together, make sure they are all being serviced by the same tower, and then run a speed test on one of them and compare with speeds generated when you run speed tests at the same time across ten or so devices, and this is just one user getting a few devices together at the same time when the average number of users per sector is supposed to be upwards of 300.

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[JHBThree]

Now that is something of an interesting comment. How is it that LTE is designed for large numbers of users any more than EVDO is, for example?

I can imagine situations in which LTE would be worse than WCDMA and evdo, too, such as fairly high in a building or when near cell edge from two or more towers when the network is loaded and the adjacent towers are unable to shift resource block utilization to avoid co-interference.

Also, with no idea if it is related to iphone LTE devices, speed tests on verizon lte in portland this Saturday have been noticeably slower than normal and slower than I'd yet seen on LTE.

At the end of the day, there was twice as much, or more, evdo spectrum than there is LTE spectrum in most markets and it's pretty difficult to imagine that iPhones will not impact end user observed network performance at some point, barring increased tower density with smaller cells or something to that effect.

Anyway, you can do the experiment yourself, find a time in the middle of the night when the network is relatively unloaded and get a few devices together, make sure they are all being serviced by the same tower, and then run a speed test on one of them and compare with speeds generated when you run speed tests at the same time across ten or so devices, and this is just one user getting a few devices together at the same time when the average number of users per sector is supposed to be upwards of 300.

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LTE scales better. It was specifically designed to support a much larger number of simultaneous users with little to no degradation in speeds.

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[anon62607]

LTE scales better. It was specifically designed to support a much larger number of simultaneous users with little to no degradation in speeds.

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I have a full copy of the specification for r8 and r10, can you point to specific technical items that support that? I'm not saying it's not true, really, but from a technical aspect I'm not getting where you're seeing that aisde from it just being physically impossible. 10 mhz of spectrum is still 10 mhz of spectrum, the modulation complexity is of the same order as EVDO A and wcdma. You will get more out of 2x2 MIMO of course but can do that with HSPA too, and the enhancements for cell edge performance when there are cross interfering cells doesn't appear until r10.

Once again, not disagreeing with you but I don't see where that's coming from in the technical specification.

 

[anon(3653)]

I do not know about the technical specifics regarding increased traffic on towers and speed. I can only speak about my experiences. When LTE first came to my town in April 2011 I was getting around 25 mbps down on a regular basis near my house. By the end of 2011 I was down to 15-20. This summer I have been closer to 10-15. Not sure about since the iPhone moved to 4g. My point is my speeds are usually half of what they were when I was one of the first on 4g in town. Either increased traffic has reduced it or Verizon's equipment has degraded.

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[JHBThree]

I have a full copy of the specification for r8 and r10, can you point to specific technical items that support that? I'm not saying it's not true, really, but from a technical aspect I'm not getting where you're seeing that aisde from it just being physically impossible. 10 mhz of spectrum is still 10 mhz of spectrum, the modulation complexity is of the same order as EVDO A and wcdma. You will get more out of 2x2 MIMO of course but can do that with HSPA too, and the enhancements for cell edge performance when there are cross interfering cells doesn't appear until r10.

Once again, not disagreeing with you but I don't see where that's coming from in the technical specification.

It's part of the spec. LTE uses available spectrum much more efficiently than any other preexisting wireless technology. While it may just be 10 mhz, that 10 mhz is used far more efficiently, and has the ability to support many more users, than either EVDO or HSPA.

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[anon62607]

It's part of the spec. LTE uses available spectrum much more efficiently than any other preexisting wireless technology. While it may just be 10 mhz, that 10 mhz is used far more efficiently, and has the ability to support many more users, than either EVDO or HSPA.

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LTE target spectral efficiency in terms of bits/Hz is below that of HSPA.

 

[JHBThree]

No, it isn't.

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[anon62607]

No, it isn't.

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Only if you compare r6 HSPA with 4x4 or 2x2 LTE. As deployed (2x2 vs 2x2) they are very close to identical and HSPA is slightly superior.

MIMO for HSPA exists now too.

So, 10 mhz channel, 9 million symbols per second, 6 bits per symbol, 2 spatial layers, and 31/32 FEC is somehow going to be better than DC HSPA with 2x2 MIMO? It's almost exactly the same theoretical bitrate but with less going to control and guard in HSPA than with lte. How is lte better?

 

[anon62607]

And to get slightly back on topic, here's my just now observed speed test compared to some historical ones. The tests immediately before the most recent were early in the morning and the wifi one was via a wimax hub, then the next several were via EVDO or 1x in the middle of the Nevada desert, the test before that on the 29th was approximately representative of what I saw until Saturday - around 20 mbps but sometimes as low as 12 or 13.

 

[anon62607]

And another, and this is about as low performance from lte as I have yet seen. Also the fact that reverse channel is faster than forward channel is one of the more traditional indicators that there is spectrum constraint.

Tower / sector ID is 04872 for the record.

 

[Ry]

No noticeable difference for me.

 

[One Radical Dude]

No noticeable changes in speeds in nearby LTE locations.

 

[anon62607]

Daytime LTE performance (particularly uplink) is significantly slower than it was a year ago, but it's difficult to characterize that as to which type of UE is causing it.

 

[cowboys2000]

I checked my LTE speed this afternoon and it was the fastest to date:

Today: 29496 kpbs down 15134 kpbs up

9/26/12: 15360 kpbs and 6139 kpbs

Houston , TX

At same time Sprint Showed 6156 kpbs and 562 kpbs on Galaxy Nexus.

iPhone 5 refused to latch onto LTE long enough to test!!

 

[JHBThree]

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/12/09/29/9u2ureve.jpg

Daytime LTE performance (particularly uplink) is significantly slower than it was a year ago, but it's difficult to characterize that as to which type of UE is causing it.

Probably caused by more subscribers this year than anything else. I've noticed no difference at all.

 

[anon62607]

Probably caused by more subscribers this year than anything else. I've noticed no difference at all.

There's an ongoing thread on Howard Forums about LTE speeds in general on Verizon, there are a number of examples showing up now with downlink at 2 mbps or below with uplink still fairly fast.

And yes, it's really not easy to determine where that loading is coming from, and I've noticed a degradation ever since thunderbolt release day but I'd characterize performance as no better than fair midday anymore, rather than the better-than-cable modem that it used to be.

It certainly does seem quite a bit slower to me.

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[anon62607]

Probably caused by more subscribers this year than anything else. I've noticed no difference at all.

In July, there were 10.9 million lte devices on verizon, presuming about half of the new iphones were on verizon that'd add about 2.5 million devices or 20 percent or so to the network load. That should be enough to notice, on average, but not really be painful. I could imagine that in the first week or so network load is quite a bit higher from the new device owners trying out their phones and running speed tests over and over again and so on, and if that load is 2 or 3x what normal use would be, the total increase in load would be for a few days at least 40 to 60 percent (I'm totally guessing here) which should be quite noticeable.

That would come back down as use stabilized.

In comparison, there is something like 90 million evdo devices sharing only about 2.5 the spectrum that LTE has so overall the LTE side should be a lot less loaded than the EVDO side,but that makes sense to me too as evdo performance has not been even half its theoretical limit for me for a long time.

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[JHBThree]

There's an ongoing thread on Howard Forums about LTE speeds in general on Verizon, there are a number of examples showing up now with downlink at 2 mbps or below with uplink still fairly fast.

And yes, it's really not easy to determine where that loading is coming from, and I've noticed a degradation ever since thunderbolt release day but I'd characterize performance as no better than fair midday anymore, rather than the better-than-cable modem that it used to be.

It certainly does seem quite a bit slower to me.

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Your area will be a factor too. Verizon has been shoring up the network in my area consistently, so the capacity is there to support more users.