Finnish Carrier Sets New World Record for 4G Download Speeds
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Meanwhile in Germany, providers ask ~8 euros per month for a 14.4-50 Mbit/s "flatrate" with 1Gb traffic limit... they do provide "unlimited" traffic as advertised but once you consume more than that you are restricted to ISDN speeds (about 64kbit/s). The marketing guys came up with the word "high-speed volume" so they don't need to refer to this as a "limit".
Really scummy practices if you ask me. :( Although the average person may be content with 1Gb of data per month, what use could 64kbit/s have in 2016 (other than texts and narrowband voip ("Call your friends like its 1999™")?
The core issue here is the lack of fiber-connected base stations. The vast majority of them globally are connected with microwave connections that will not be able to handle 1gbps speeds for multiple users at once.
This is a rather significant issue, as laying fiber from the backhaul (sometimes even backbone) network requires a lot of earthwork, the fiber needs to be laid underground and active infrastructure also needs to be deployed. I don't see this happening anytime soon.
Having a small population and only a few highly populated metropolitan areas make it easy.
Providing 1gbps cellular connection in NYC isn't really possible, Helsinki on the other hand is doable. As for the rural areas they aren't covered in Finland and even if a few are the size of the country also plays a role because good luck getting 1gig cell towers across Nebraska.
Except the excuse you hear from Americans in every single thread about mobile tech is "Oh but the US has such a low population density! Obviously our service must be crap and cost a shitload!"
Overall the US is in an odd position where tha large cities are too populated and the suburban metropolitan areas tend to be considerably less dense due to primarily single family housing over fairly large land plots. Combine that with NIMBY mentality and the overall geographic scale and you don't get the best environment for rapidly deploying infrastructure.
If you exclude MVNO's most countries have pretty similar number of mobile and broadband providers.
There are three physical countrywide LTE/3G/GSM networks in Finland: Telia/Sonera, Elisa and DNA. They then carry some MVNOs so there are more places where you can actually buy a SIM card than just these three.
Most people buy their phone here separately from the operator contract, so there are much fewer contract phones than e.g. in the U.S. Thus there is competition for phone sales, and competition for operator contracts, separately.
Telia/Sonera is the former state monopoly, Elisa grew out of Helsinki telephone association/company, and DNA is a merger of small countryside operators. Sonera has the best coverage throughout the country, DNA curiously enough has the best coverage in urban areas.
Of course, we can still always say that there is not enough competition between operators, as their prices tend to converge. Consumer advocates usually have only two kinds of messages: either all prices are nearly the same ("competition is not working!") or there are large disparities in prices ("competition is not working!").
Oddly enough many countries somehow seem to devolve to the magic number of "3" which is usually the one old state run company, the "1990's/1980's" deregulation one, and the newer one which is also in many countries a consortium of several 2nd wave players that had to consolidate to survive.
Clearly there are some other forces driving cellular communication in Finland other than only having 3 carriers.
The difference is that Finland has effective competition, whereas other countries have nominal competition.
A good and effective regulative authority has definitely helped, but the fact that Finnish operators actually both invest and compete makes for all the difference.
The 4G+ 300mbit plans from Elisa cost 60 Euros a month without a device, I haven't seen anything so far that is that unusual.
Consumer prices.
Geographical coverage.
Unlimited and unrestricted usage.
> If you look at the actual coverage map Finland isn't considerably better than most countries including the US, 4G+ is available in a few hotspots only, and the LTE and 3G coverage is pretty similar.
How did you perform this comparison? I find this claim very unlikely to be correct.
> The 4G+ 300mbit plans from Elisa cost 60 Euros a month without a device, I haven't seen anything so far that is that unusual
This is incorrect.
DNA 300M plan is 30€ per month. Elisa and Sonera are 50€ Per month. All plans without a contract, quotas or limits.
300M are premium flagship plans with a premium price. 100M plan are like 15€.
Starter plans with 50 minutes of talk time and 0,25 Mbps of uncapped, unlimited and unrestricted usage are free on Sonera's network.
What other country comes even close?
There are five mobile operators in Finland: Elisa, Sonera, DNA, Ålcom and Ukko Mobile.
There are lots and lots of wireline operators.
> If you exclude MVNO's most countries have pretty similar number of mobile and broadband providers.
There are similar numbers of mobile operators in most countries because there is only so much spectrum to go around. However there is a great deal of difference in the amount of wireline broadband providers per country.
Sorry still counting 3, as Alcom and Ukko don't really "count" Alcom is a regional operator for the Aland islands this isn't unusual.
Don't know about Ukko or what they cover, can't even figure out if they are an MVNO or not their wikipedia entry says that they operate LTE 31 which makes them sound like a rural/remote region operator since that's what most of these low bands are used for.
If they indeed operate on the LTE 31 band this also means they are a speciality carrier which also means they have to provide you with their own devices since I'm not aware of any mass market consumer device which supports B31.
And a quick look on their website does seem to suggest that they provide cellular internet and speciality connections to mostly remote areas, mostly through roaming and partnerships (MVNO) with other cellular providers.
EDIT: You can count Ukko out completely they do not provide voice at all not to mention that paying 85 Euros on a 12 month contract for 3-10 Mbit/s without a device is laughable.
http://www.ukkoverkot.fi/tuotteet/?lang=en
>There are similar numbers of mobile operators in most countries because there is only so much spectrum to go around. However there is a great deal of difference in the amount of wireline broadband providers per country.
The cellular spectrum especially in regards to 4G LTE channels is pretty damn large, and most countries started with more than 3-4 cellular providers they just had decades of consolidation since then.
Ukko is an MNO, not an MVNO. They hold a national license for the 450 MHz band which they use to provide data services in all of Finland.
Here is their coverage map: http://www.ukkoverkot.fi/kuuluvuus/
> If they indeed operate on the LTE 31 band this also means they are a speciality carrier which also means they have to provide you with their own devices since I'm not aware of any mass market consumer device which supports B31
Correct.
> The cellular spectrum especially in regards to 4G LTE channels is pretty damn large, and most countries started with more than 3-4 cellular providers they just had decades of consolidation since then.
Not all LTE bands are available in all countries.
That's something which is easy to change if there was a will, LTE bands mostly "replace" the older mish mash of bands and technologies that were deployed in various countries. This is why the both cover the GSM bands as well as TDMA/CDMA and even oddities like iDEN. So for the most part they are an easy transition, if you as a carrier already "owned" the rights for band X you usually would not have to secure a bid for that band again to use it for 4G/LTE.
With almost 70 bands you could easily push towards more carriers, however the competition and market forces seem to push towards consolidation since they buy in and the maintenance costs for the infrastructure are so high and overall margins could potentially be quite slim, looking at AT&T and Verizon their margins are only around 10-12% on average.
You don't really believe that, now do you?
Clearing the usage of new frequency bands is a huge regulatory undertaking involving multiple countries. It takes years and massive effort even when there is a very strong will and a clear need.
Tell that to somebody who would have to rely on satellite if it were not for Ukko. And it's not like you can't run your choice of VoIP over that.
The mobile networks however are first rate despite having low download quotas. On Vodafone (a cheaper network) where I live I get 60 mbit down and 30 mbit up over 4G. For the record that's 6-12 times faster than my dsl connection depending on if it's raining or not.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/australias-4g-net...
But there's at least HSDPA just about everywhere in Finland.
The only times I had no cellphone coverage at all is when I went hiking and it didn't drop from LTE to 2g it just dropped completely above a certain elevation.
(I shouldn't complain though, I'm using heavily throttled internet for free)
Here's a map for the carrier in question: https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/
Pretty much wherever I go, I have at least 3G connectivity from maybe 2Mbps upwards. This basically anywhere except some areas of Lapland wilderness, where nobody lives.
This costs around 20€/month, 30€ if you want unlimited calls and sms.
And I'm not sure 7000 is considered very rural in Finland, Vaala is probably less than half than that and I'm not sure how "rural" in the grand scheme of things that it is, it's not Iceland where you can have 50 people and be considered a town.
Covering a large metropolitan area is hard, tons of people, tons of high buildings and abstraction that make LOS pain in the ass, tons of shadows and reflections due to glass/steel construction and almost impossible to do large infrastructure project because opening a main road in a central city is a huge PITA, add to that all the people that do not want transmitters on their property, in LOS of them, near the school, near the hospital, near the playground and you get a pretty shitty situation.
Sure there are things that some better regulation or incentives might solve but in the grand scheme of things not everything is scalable when you take it from a city of 500,000 to a city of 12M.
Population density is a red herring -- deliverable service speed has much more to do with the amount of money the carrier wants to spend on provisioning service than the population density.
fwiw: I travel quite a bit and the fastest LTE service I've tested has been in Tokyo (high population density) @ 52M/23M. meanwhile, here in Montana (low population density) I usually see around 20M/15M.
I assume the quoted wireless speeds are for a single client under perfect conditions, what summed up bandwidth can a single tower support with multiple clients? 10 or 40G probably go a long way already.
They also make 100 GbE DAC cables.
Longer distances do cost more... Just looking around I found some 100GBASE-LR4 transceivers going for $6k a pop from Finisair... but at least you get to continue using your single mode fiber ;-)
Single mode cable is cheaper and the optics are about the same for all use cases other than very short range 100G.
10G Etherner SFP+ modules aren't $100 a pop, it's more like $20-40 from third party providers. You can also do better than $0.33/ft for 12 count outdoor fiber.
100G optics are $400 for multimode and $1500 for singlemode. You gonna pay a lot more for switch or router ports tho.
47.6 Mbps download / 23 Mbps upload
I use Verizon, which has deployed LTE-Advanced which allows for the carrier aggregation of different data streams on different spectrums.
My phone uses the Qualcomm MDM 9635 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7
The Samsung Galaxy S7 uses the more advanced 9645 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12
Honestly, I don't know why I need > 45 Mbits/ sec download and 23 Mbits/sec upload. I don't seem to have problems at all with Verizon, even with the tall buildings.
What I do have problems with is the high cost of the service which does much to explain why people don't use more bandwidth on Verizon and use more on WiFi.
I would much prefer lower costs for Verizon data usage than higher download speeds.
Would vastly prefer 10/5 or 10/2 or something with near-unlimited data.
They do specify the techniques they used:
* Five-carrier aggregation: Each LTE carrier uses up to 20 MHz, so this uses 100 MHz of bandwidth dedicated to a single user. Bandwidth in the air is scarce and many carriers do not have that much in total. LTE is expanding into higher frequencies (towards 5GHz) where there is more BW available, but the range is shorter.
* 256 QAM: This requires very good receivers and extremely low background noise and interference.
* 4x4 MIMO: MIMO is quite magic and unpredictable, even more so than radio signal propagation in general. For 4x4 to work the phone needs to have four separate antennas, and they need to be separated enough to receive different combinations of signals from the four transmitter antennas. 2x2 MIMO is common and works if you are close enough to the base station and get lucky with the angles and signal reflections.
http://corporate.elisa.com/press-releases/bulletin/?id=41240...
Regulation in Finland defines what broadband speeds are acceptable. This includes mobile broadband. Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds using a 4 hour average or a minimum of 40% of top speeds at any time.
And this regulation is enforced.
Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds [...]