The State of LTE in September 2015
opensignal.com
opensignal.com
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/26/does-high...
Sprint and T-Mobile have significantly worse networks and access to spectrum.
Does not help that AT&T and Verizon are also huge stakeholders in the wired telecom oligopoly. They are overflowing in cash to crush competition.
Google margins are way higher and Verizon employees more call center reps then all of Google in total.
From my understanding Google fiber is basically cheap dark fiber they got with some great regulatory concessions.
My view of it is Google spends enough just to prompt others to take actions (see their involvement in specturm bidding). Though my post might come off as judgemental, I'm not judging Google - that's merely good business for them to do. Wireless companies themselves are hardly examples of efficiency.
Their involvement with spectrum bidding got them open access rights for only a few million.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious here though..
The existing infrastructure part is companies will refuse to update their system for as long as the existing one kinda works. Sometimes with only 1 or 2 companies covering a region. If both stay at 3G, the customer basically doesn't have a choice. So no need to upgrade.
If it was an African country, without an existing network, they might choose to jump to the latest technology (like some skipped installing wired phones and just went to cell phones in the past). In the chart Khazakstan and Uruguay is perhaps in that category.
In the speed category Romania kills it with 30Mbps. That's pretty cool for being a relatively poor European country.
The latter part is the real elephant in the room here - the former reason is by now a cliché putdown when it comes to infrastructure investment in the US. Kazahkstan and Uruguay are not small, even less dense than the US, and poorer - yet have better LTE coverage.
The Canadian numbers are problematic for a few reasons: 1) LTE mainly means you can run through your (typically <= 1gb/month) "bucket" in about 5 minutes, with overage charges starting from the first byte over. So what's the point of LTE is artificially constrained?
Contrast this with France where providers give you a bigger LTE bandwidth cap because it's more spectrally efficient.
2) There are several non-overlapping LTE providers. If one provider has LTE in an area but yours does not, you cannot roam to the other. So what's the point of measuring if a user could get an LTE signal?
By "proprietary" we basically mean "here's a cool new metric (ps we invented it)" not "here's a cool new metric (ps we're not gonna tell you how it works)". That said the link to the methodology is a little buried, but you can find the details here: http://opensignal.com/methodology/time_coverage/
One thing to note is that it's possible that if you only launched LTE in urban areas and the LET users stay within those urban areas, then the time-coverage can be great, even if if the geographic coverage is poor and a low percentage of the population has access to LTE overall. Nonetheless, it is a measurement of the experience that those users that have LTE are getting.
Given this, we do have to be wary about markets where LTE is not mature yet.
Good point re. unlimited vs limited data plans and how the latter can make it easier for an operator to provide good throughput (but overall you might get less volume). This is illustrative of a bigger challenge - there's no single metric that can tell you: "this is the best operator in the world". We're never going to claim that. But our crowdsourced data can offer a global, impartial view that I think has been missing.
LTE has wayyyyyy better reliability, lower latency and jitter than 3G. Interactive browsing on LTE is a night-and-day better experience compared to 3G. My dad uses his phone to collect payments with Square and on 3G it can sometimes take over 5 minutes for a transaction to go through; on LTE it rarely takes more than a second.
It is good that they have a way of measuring coverage that is not strictly geographically based but since it is proprietary it is hard to actually know what it means.
Lte speeds are faster than Wifi due to the backhaul obviously, typically wireless carriers buy higher BW backhaul that wifi providers since wifi is free so they tend to skimp on that, in theory wifi can do about the same speeds as Lte from the air interface capability by itself.
On the first point, yes, you're completely right that we are measuring the whole package, however we'd argue that this is what users really care about.
And I agree, the end to end is where the rubber meets the road but I think with the state of LTE, particularly where Advanced features like CA come in to play, we are at times being throttled by the internet more than by the air interface. Although, we are a long way from having that type of tput across the air interface everywhere, but it seems like LTE has the potential to start outstripping what the current internet can do.
Drei/Three here upgraded every single base station throught the country so that you know have LTE in the mountains and rural areas even, though some of the backhaul is not yet fiber in those areas.
It's bizarre now that the mobile networks are faster than what comes out of the cable.
//edit: i doubt the opensignal numbers. They seem very ... different than real live. Wonder how they measure.
50% coverage in a big country is not really less than 80% in a much smaller one. It would be interesting to have a way to visualize the network coverage taking into account that.
Although, that said, I think it could still be interesting and it's definitely feedback we'll take on board for next time. I'd say that the gap between 50% and 80% time on LTE is actually pretty important to the user.
So I am not sure how accurate this is.