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Comment by chrisfinazzo | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest, LTE was always oversold in terms of its technical limitations. The first reference to it that I can recall seeing (years ago) actually was describing LTE Advanced (~150 Mb/s), but conveniently left out that information.

I know that it had been shown in testing to reach 200 Mb/s - call me when real world usage data can show that kind of result.

In reality, the kind of progress that @barbegal mentions has done more to advance device capabilities, but for something that was initially sold as a 10x speed improvement over 3GPP, it hasn't really panned out.

The telecom folks make a bunch of noise about how you can replace a home connection with these kinds of technologies, but until prices come down and speeds go (way) up, the wireline people don't have much to worry about.

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I have never been unimpressed by LTE. It's reliably fast, even if it's not blowing records. I know that if I have good-full LTE signal that if my shoddy 1Gb Spectrum connection or my wireless has issues I can just disable my phones wireless and get a great stable connection. Yeah, it's not going to replace my home internet but it is incredibly better than 3g. I know if my phones on 3g it's not even worth using for anything other than phone/sms. Definitely not MMS.

LTE Advanced with carrier aggregation can certainly deliver on speeds. Here is a fresh speedtest taken just now, were I'm getting 185Mbps down. I'm inside a building but only 1 block from the cell site and I'm getting 3x Carrier Aggregation on 2.5GHz (band 41) on Sprint. I'll admit these are pretty ideal circumstances for a speed test but I just opened the app an ran it to show the speeds are possible.

I've often found the most limiting factor (beside RF interference) is not LTE directly but the backhaul connections at cell sites. If you only have a 1 gig ethernet link, that limits your speeds when you get a handful of active users.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/4239773416

I’ve gotten 150 mbps down using the Ookla Speedtest app on my iPhone 6s at the strip mall nearest to me. (Nowhere special, suburban Annapolis.)

Tried it just now at my house on my iPhone SE: 29 mbps down, 28 msec ping. One floor right above my Wifi router, I’m getting just 30 mbps (7 msec ping however) over Wifi, so the LTE performance isn’t too shabby.

That's fair, although I suspect the infrastructure is more developed in certain areas because the Naval Academy is there. The SE result is pretty typical from what I've seen. When I only had 25/5, I'd be really excited by such a thing, but 100/35 has ruined me.

My experience with LTE in the US (primarily west coast) has left a lot to be desired but that’s not always the case overseas.

Random result in Stockholm, in a relatively built-up office district:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/2834370481

I’ve never found myself disappointed with LTE performance, even the RTT is “good enough” for 90% of my applications

LTE is awesome. The latency alone makes is huge and can not be overstated, it truly is a game changer.

These numbers typically don't reflect a single client, and it would be foolish to present those numbers. Real world numbers for LTE are an order of magnitude better than anything previously. It often is better than a good wifi connection, I just don't see the point in using wifi anymore.

> The telecom folks make a bunch of noise about how you can replace a home connection with these kinds of technologies, but until prices come down and speeds go (way) up, the wireline people don't have much to worry about.

In Austria, you can get unlimited 21-25Mbps LTE internet, without a contract for about 20€ per month. It may not be the fastest, but it is enough for Netflix.

Depends where you are. In london there is an ISP that does replace your internet connection with LTE.

granted at scale its not 150 megs a second, but thats partly down to resources.

On the train I can get between 40-80megabits a second peak. The average speed is around 22megabits: https://opensignal.com/reports/2018/04/uk/state-of-the-mobil....

Just sitting here behind my desk, running a speedtest, I get 210Mbit(!!) out of my iPhone 7, over the T-Mobile network. No optimisations at all, not on a high roof or taped to a mast. Doesn't get more real-world than that.

In central London on EE I can get 140Mbps sometimes and it’s usually above 80Mbps.

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