Data Speeds and Deprioritization

[rusty136]

I have a T-Mobile Prepaid plan. At my home, I can get mind boggling speeds early in the morning, when traffic is light. At 5am this morning, I got 168 Mbps download, 45 Mbps upload, with a Pixel 4XL, using the Ookla speedtest. At 5 pm, I'm lucky to get 3 Mbps download. Are the Magenta postpaid plans given a higher priority at busy times, or would I likely get the same results as with the Prepaid plan ?

 

[Rukbat]

5PM? When everyone is calling home as s/he's leaving work? You picked about the second worst time of the entire year to test your speed - Monday to Friday, 5-6PM. (The second worst time is Christmas, when everyone has his or her new WiFi or mobile data toy running. Telephone calls may fail on Mother's Day morning, but data is much worse at 5PM, M-F.)

 

[Almeuit]

I have a T-Mobile Prepaid plan. At my home, I can get mind boggling speeds early in the morning, when traffic is light. At 5am this morning, I got 168 Mbps download, 45 Mbps upload, with a Pixel 4XL, using the Ookla speedtest. At 5 pm, I'm lucky to get 3 Mbps download. Are the Magenta postpaid plans given a higher priority at busy times, or would I likely get the same results as with the Prepaid plan ?

Yes. The postpaid get higher priority usually.. that said if your area is just congested it won't matter much. So chances are it might not matter much.

 

[Almeuit]

5PM? When everyone is calling home as s/he's leaving work? You picked about the second worst time of the entire year to test your speed - Monday to Friday, 5-6PM. (The second worst time is Christmas, when everyone has his or her new WiFi or mobile data toy running. Telephone calls may fail on Mother's Day morning, but data is much worse at 5PM, M-F.)

Calling? Lol calling doesn't stress a network

 

[L0n3N1nja]

Calling? Lol calling doesn't stress a network

He isn't wrong, the network can only handle so many calls.

 

[Almeuit]

He isn't wrong, the network can only handle so many calls.

Calls are so minor. Like very minor. They take very little bandwidth. Going from 160 to barely 3 is more from streaming music, Netflix, etc... Not a voice call.

 

[B. Diddy]

I don't think Rukbat was referring to just voice calls. He's just old school, like me, and thinks of smartphones as things to make calls with. But what's implied is that people are just getting on the network to do all manner of stuff, which can lead to congestion.

 

[Almeuit]

I don't think Rukbat was referring to just voice calls. He's just old school, like me, and thinks of smartphones as things to make calls with. But what's implied is that people are just getting on the network to do all manner of stuff, which can lead to congestion.

I mean they def do but they're just data now. A VoLTE call uses around 10-15 KB/sec average. Very minimal. Congestion now a days is people steaming tons of music and Netflix on trains / busses.

 

[B. Diddy]

Agreed, but the general notion was that data use in general spikes at that time (as you mentioned). That is a pretty big drop in speed, but if the concentration of users is high enough, I suppose that would be enough to explain it.

I did a quick search about the whole deprioritization question, and couldn't find an official answer. The general consensus is that there is some, but the prepaid isn't supposed to be much lower on the hierarchy compared to postpaid. Certainly not as low as T-Mobile MVNO's like Metro.

 

[Rukbat]

Calling? Lol calling doesn't stress a network

Tell that to telcos. Everyone in the business knows that the networks still fall apart on Mother's Day morning, because they can't handle the load (and they're not going to increase capacity 150% for one morning a year).

Even on cellular - VoLTE calling puts extra data on the network - and when you're talking about "extra" being in the area of 50 million calls simultaneously
it adds up. (Shooting one income tax return to the company isn't much data either, but it brought Quicken's server down one year. CNN's cdn has already gone down a few times, when really hot news breaks - and connecting to a website is a light load. So don't discount "a few packets", when there are many millions of people doing it.)

I don't think Rukbat was referring to just voice calls. He's just old school, like me, and thinks of smartphones as things to make calls with.

But what's implied is that people are just getting on the network to do all manner of stuff, which can lead to congestion.

Even light stuff - like text chat. On December 25, 1996, a few IRC networks were basically "off the air" as ping times on the network went from ms to minutes. (I personally measured a 38 minute ping on Dalnet when the network pretty much broke into 3 pieces. Just from an occasional line of text. On Christmas morning. With hundreds of thousands [few millions?] of new people, in addition to all the normal users [about 50,000 at the time] - who just gave up and turned their computers off.)

I mean they def do but they're just data now. A VoLTE call uses around 10-15 KB/sec average. Very minimal.

10KB/sec times 20 million people doing it at the same time (remember, this ends up on the internet) is 200 million KB/sec (200GB/s) load. That's probably a substantial addition to the normal traffic.

 

[Almeuit]

Tell that to telcos. Everyone in the business knows that the networks still fall apart on Mother's Day morning, because they can't handle the load (and they're not going to increase capacity 150% for one morning a year).

Even on cellular - VoLTE calling puts extra data on the network - and when you're talking about "extra" being in the area of 50 million calls simultaneously
it adds up. (Shooting one income tax return to the company isn't much data either, but it brought Quicken's server down one year. CNN's cdn has already gone down a few times, when really hot news breaks - and connecting to a website is a light load. So don't discount "a few packets", when there are many millions of people doing it.)

Even light stuff - like text chat. On December 25, 1996, a few IRC networks were basically "off the air" as ping times on the network went from ms to minutes. (I personally measured a 38 minute ping on Dalnet when the network pretty much broke into 3 pieces. Just from an occasional line of text. On Christmas morning. With hundreds of thousands [few millions?] of new people, in addition to all the normal users [about 50,000 at the time] - who just gave up and turned their computers off.)


10KB/sec times 20 million people doing it at the same time (remember, this ends up on the internet) is 200 million KB/sec (200GB/s) load. That's probably a substantial addition to the normal traffic.

Yes calls use data but not enough to tank. The tank is from music and video streaming. Calling isn't that big anymore.. sorry.. look at statistics.

 

[B. Diddy]

The bottom line for the OP is that 5 PM is still peak data usage time, and so it may not be that unusual for download speeds to plummet, depending on the population density and the strength of the network in your area. Depri probably does occur to a small extent, but it shouldn't be a huge difference from postpaid (compared with the MVNOs).

 

[Almeuit]

The bottom line for the OP is that 5 PM is still peak data usage time, and so it may not be that unusual for download speeds to plummet, depending on the population density and the strength of the network in your area. Depri probably does occur to a small extent, but it shouldn't be a huge difference from postpaid (compared with the MVNOs).

Yeah that is what I said in my first post .