Sprint to change Rates Effective January 31, 2011

[duckwars]

1. You guys selling phones, your stories about how many of whichever carrier is being ported to the other don't mean a thing. The sample you're collecting is too small from the population to make any inferences.

It's like if you sat in a park, so 5 bikes go by and all of them were blue and you came to the conclusion "All bikes must be blue". It doesn't make any sense

2. You really think your average consumer will know the difference between wimax and LTE? Do you think they are running speedtest.net speed tests to see which one is faster?

The difference in speed between LTE and WiMax is way too little for anyone to notice. I have an EVO and the 4G speeds have gotten to the point where I don't care if I'm on real wifi or on WiMax. LTE being faster really doesn't matter (and I'm not even sure it is faster).

Now when I tell my friends I have unlimited minutes for mobile-to-mobile, then clarify not ONLY to Sprint mobile phones but to all of them, they nearly crap themselves.

The difference in benefit from having free mobile-to-mobile far outweigh the difference of speed of LTE compared to WiMax. Add-on unlimited data, and unlimited texting at no extra charge... as GOB would say "C'MON!!"

 

[Droid800]

The difference in speed between LTE and WiMax is way too little for anyone to notice. I have an EVO and the 4G speeds have gotten to the point where I don't care if I'm on real wifi or on WiMax. LTE being faster really doesn't matter (and I'm not even sure it is faster).

Yikes. Gotta call BS on this one. Verizon's LTE has been clocked at anywhere from 4mbps all the way up to 30mbps. The best WiMax can offer is a little over 10mbps, and those are peak speeds that most users will never see.

4G Coverage and Speeds

Verizon LTE Speed Test: Insanely Fast

 

[BigRick10]

Someone hit 17mbps on wimax on the evo and I've gotton 15mbps. That's more than enough. Its just a phone. Verizon's LTE will slow down once all these phones start using it.

 

[Chris Kerrigan]

You also have to keep in mind that after a certain point, things like the browser can only open web pages as fast as the software hardware can render them. And trust me when I say, I've seen network speeds that have surpassed that threshold.

 

[Droid800]

Someone hit 17mbps on wimax on the evo and I've gotton 15mbps. That's more than enough. Its just a phone. Verizon's LTE will slow down once all these phones start using it.

See but here's the thing; Verizon's LTE will offer those speeds for ALL users, not just a few like WiMax. Thanks to Verizon's chunk of spectrum for LTE, its going to offer a more consistent experience. (for example, with WiMax, I never hit higher than 3 mbps, and that was in one of Sprint's better-covered areas)

 

[duckwars]

Yikes. Gotta call BS on this one. Verizon's LTE has been clocked at anywhere from 4mbps all the way up to 30mbps. The best WiMax can offer is a little over 10mbps, and those are peak speeds that most users will never see.

4G Coverage and Speeds

Verizon LTE Speed Test: Insanely Fast

It's not about which is faster it's about the difference in speed. The step from EDGE to 3G was HUGE, and the step from 3G to "4G" is huge (notice I didn't put that huge in all caps) whatever the speed difference is between WiMax and LTE is not that much.

4G has hit the ceiling of of use. People want those fast speeds mostly for navigating webpages and right now Sprint's WiMax is as fast as the average consumer cares.

You put an LTE phone right next to a Sprint WiMax phone, show it to your average customer and they won't care much, if at all.

When you tell them that Sprint is cheaper and offers more services (come on they are basically giving everyone infinite talking time with mobile to mobile) that consumer will jump on that offer.

DIMINISHING MARGINAL RETURNS!!!

Diminishing returns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[anon62607]

Yikes. Gotta call BS on this one. Verizon's LTE has been clocked at anywhere from 4mbps all the way up to 30mbps. The best WiMax can offer is a little over 10mbps, and those are peak speeds that most users will never see.

4G Coverage and Speeds

Verizon LTE Speed Test: Insanely Fast

Verizon's LTE is on 20 MHz of spectrum total (FDD), and Clear's wimax is deployed on 10 MHz (TDD). You can't really compare the standards by comparing those two implementations of the standards. Moreover clear's network is already fairly heavily loaded and the Verizon LTE network is all but completely unloaded at this point, Clear themselves demonstrated LTE in 20+20 FDD configurations getting 90+ mbps to a mobile terminal and wimax has been demonstrated at 70 mbps (in less spectrum) which is great but all of that bandwidth has to be distributed to all users sharing a sector an those tests are on a completely unloaded sector. There's no real technical reason why LTE will be faster on the downlink than WiMax if deployed in the same amount of spectrum with the same number of users sharing the sector.

WiMax could be faster on the uplink than LTE given all other equal conditions.

The real question is what will it look like when both networks are reasonably loaded? That comes down to sector size and users per sector, and with clear there are 3x 10 Mhz frequency domain sector per geographic domain and with version there is a single 20 (10+10) Mhz frequency domain sector per geographic domain, a clear tower should be able to handle about 150% the area that a Verizon LTE tower does in the average case given even user distribution.

In the middle of the night speedtests Verizon's LTE is going to be faster than Clear/Sprint's WiMax but that's due to the wider spectrum that Verizon deployed LTE on, not some kind of inherent superiority of LTE over WiMax.

All that said, I do think Clear will end up being a three-standard carrier and Sprint will be LTE+WiMax in the end, just like the demonstration of LTE in 20+20 FDD, LTE in 20 TDD and also WiMax in 3x10TDD (and leave about 30 Mhz for WiMax2). If Clear evolves that way it's (and Sprint's) 4G service will be much faster than Verizon's.

Long winded but basically don't compare LTE and WiMax by comparing Verizon's unloaded LTE network on twice the spectrum as Clear's heavily loaded WiMax network as things stand today.