Engadget Review - 1.5mbps ? WTF?

[YoungSpade8]

See, the thing is, is 4G even out yet? And is that the signal that the Atrix had in the review? Also, how good was the signal of other phones in that same area? You can't just assume that phone has slow bandwidth speeds because if that one check in that one location.

I have a rooted captivate and I get HSUPA now; 3.5 down and over 1 up last time I.checked.

 

[eallan]

See, the thing is, is 4G even out yet? And is that the signal that the Atrix had in the review? Also, how good was the signal of other phones in that same area? You can't just assume that phone has slow bandwidth speeds because if that one check in that one location.

I have a rooted captivate and I get HSUPA now; 3.5 down and over 1 up last time I.checked.

It doesn't matter if it's "out" or not. The 3G service shouldn't be lower than the iPhone on the same network.

 

[Fountainhead]

One thing that's an uncomfortable side effect of "faster" download speeds is the consumption of data. The faster the d/ld speed, the faster the data is consumed, and the more money carriers make when folks run over. Another effect is in a 30 day period, you run out of your paid "allotment" 10 days into the month. Everybody will have to install a "how much data have I used" app to keep up with it. Of course texting *3282# will tell you the same thing (ATT) but it would be nice to have an "app for that" in the future.
Of course, I'm an old original 30 dollar 5 Gig plan person and I've never used 5 gig in a month but the speed limits me I'm sure.

 

[anon62607]

This is the problem that comes with AT&T and T-mobile advertising this as 4G. People honestly are being led to believe that this is new technology totally different than what those networks currently run on. It isn't. Yes, its an evolution, but its not new in the sense of LTE or WiMax being new. There's no switch you can throw to go back to the 'old' 3G, because its all the same equipment.

It does use a higher order modulation (64qam, just like lte), will in short order support mimo and then probably multicarrier and mimo - once you get to the point that you're using multicarrier I don't think it's going to all be exactly the same equipment. I kinda think even going to 64qam won't use exactly the same equipment - the part that would be a software upgrade would be going from 7.2 to 14 mbps (which would be going from 10 codes at .75 code rate to 15 codes at .98, after that I think at least some of the tower hardware has to change).