T Mobile 3G/4G signal indicator.

[justsin4343]

i have had a T Mobile galaxy blaze, my g.f. had a Galaxy 3, i then had an Alcatel one touch fierce all T mobile. now i have a nokia Lunia 521(first Windows phone) but i'll save my opinions on that for another topic. I have never seen a letter. H or E or any other. I've seen LTE.on the Galaxy 3. I've seen 2G, 3G, 4G. on the rest. through an app i know that 4G really means 3.5G hspa+, EDGE is 2.5g. so it says. that is all i've ever seen. now with this Nokia it's still the same. even when I change the apn. i go from T-Mobile, till i reach my 2 gig cap, then switch to At&T LTE apn and it gives still around 12 mb download. No matter what the phone says it's top is 3.5G even if it says 4G . T mobile on the Galaxy was Lte and around 25mb download speed depending. I use a Brightspot sim now, but also use Fast.Tmobile T-Mobile apn settings. I change through all the apn's well metro pcs, At&t Lte, T Mobile US, and T-Mobile Lte. besides it seems to prolong my 2g monthly data it only has little difference in performance. whatever the case i've never seen those letters. but that doesn't mean some phones don't show them. i just wish there was an easy way to know exactly what your phone is using when it says 4G what does that mean. hspa wcmda lte 3.5G. but this is a droid forum and without an app i couldn't tell, i have no idea with this windows phone how to know for certain what data i'm using when it says whatever it says at the top.

 

[zorak950]

My attitude is, if it's fast, who cares what technology it's using?

 

[Try Stonerr]

Signal indicators depend upon two things
~the manufacturer
~the network you're connecting to

Not all phones have an H icon, and merely display "3G." Some phones go overboard and try to identify the type of every network.

If you research each type of network, they have their pluses and minuses. It started with 2G voice... GSM or CDMA... which then had SMS and MMS tacked on and both use the old-school switch-based networking methods. GPRS (G or 2G) was sloppy hack to add IP addresses to the MSISDN (phone number). GPRS is unencrypted and cannot be used during a voice call. It later was upgraded to EDGE which tripled data speeds and is the standard in most 3rd world countries that can't afford to upgrade to newer networks, and they keep figuring out ways how to make it slightly faster. Some phones show G for GPRS and E for EDGE. Some just show 2G.

WCDMA brought 3G "HD voice" and the HSPA networks were designed for internet... and specifically download channels only. . It continued to evolve into HSPA+... and some phones even have H+ icons to show these upgraded 3.5G networks. EV-DO is the HSPA rival, and not used by Tmobile nor AT&T.

4G is tricky... carriers jumped the gun and labelled HSDPA+ and early LTE networks as 4G. These can show as H+, 4G or even LTE... although most newer phones only show LTE for the 4G LTE-Advanced networks, which basically migrate more functionality to the IP address instead of the phone number... and this will allow a single phone to have multiple phone numbers using a single SIM... as well as advanced voice/text applications. Current 4G LTE has voice & SMS walled off on a separate channel from data. Once these are migrated into 4G LTE technology, the 2G networks will be decommissioned. And while LTE can technically pull 1 Gbps, it would require 200Mhz of bandwidth... which no company has... as was mentioned, most companies can't even get 20Mhz. So our networks are truly being crippled by limited bandwidth and FCC controls.

It might be also useful to note that Europe and other parts of the world use different radio bands for their cellphone networks, which is why international models of phones will not get full-speed LTE in the US.

I may be slightly over obsessed with cell technology. Here's some pretty diagrams for you all... they're a few years out of date, but still valid...

 

[Eddie Castro]

difference is the devices. your nexus 4 does not have carrier bloat wear meaning there is no tmobile program in you phone to change your h icon to a 4g. the term 4g is a carrier made up term. the actual name is hspa or hspa+ so on and so on.