Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

If you rely solely on things you read online, you might think that the US cellular infrastructure is a backward, antiquated, uncompetitive, monopolistic disaster, and that the progressive and forward-thinking European societies have done far better.

Yet the reality is, every time I go to Europe, I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities (I’ve been in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Zurich in the past year). And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.

View on HN

> And yet today in the United States, it’s basically a given that you will have a fast and reliable 4G connection available throughout the entire country, as long as you’re not in literal wilderness.

Don’t have a dog in this, but just wanted to say this is not at all true. There are so many places nowhere near wilderness where you would struggle to find a useable 4g connection.

(I’ve lived near some places like this in the northeast - I have to guess that the avalys has not traveled around that much in the US)

I'll second this, at least as of a few years ago. I used to regularly take the Amtrak train into Boston's South Station. The area near Mansfield, MA. had basically no signal, despite being in a suburb. Not sure if that's improved since then.

I'll add my anecdote: last year I took a long bus journey two ways between Hamilton, Ontario and the Philadelphia area. At one of the transfer stops, Binghamton NY I think, I picked up a 14GB SIM card and activated it in my phone, and it had signal almost the whole way to Philadelphia, I was watching videos the whole way, and made two video calls. Population density on the east is higher, but it's not that high, cutting through Pennsylvania.

It's pretty common for major roadways to have coverage but for that to disappear once you're off them.

For what it's worth, most of the outbound route (but not the return) was secondary motorways.

There are plenty of deadlines even inside the Bay Area.

> Zurich

Switzerland's cell coverage is consistently ranked in the European top 5, along Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. I work at a company where hundreds of employees get to commute and work on the train, sometimes 3-4 times a week (pre-covid), and I don't know anyone who complains about cell coverage or speed.

I personally live next to a cow field and have access to 10 Gbps FTTH and 5G from two carriers.

Depends on whether you have access to the Swisscom network or not.

> every time I go to Europe

Seems to me you go to only a specific part of Europe, i.e., central Europe.

I live in Europe and spend the last 3 years traveling/working around it. It is not one entity, and cellular infrastructure in one country implies nothing on that of another country.

So yes, Germany internet infrastructure and cellular prices is terrible, but Poland, Czech Republic, Ireland and many others got fantastic infrastructure, at least from my experience.

I think this comment is spot on. I've used cellular services in both Germany and Denmark extensively and they are nothing alike. Germany has spotty coverage; in Denmark, you have coverage pretty much everywhere even in rural areas. This is not just geography, it is also deliberate government policy.

German here that’s exactly how it is. Roaming in other countries has you stable and fast connections.

Funny thing then: I did a 1 hour video conference at pretty high resolution from roughly the Belarusian border a few weeks ago. It definitely qualified as 'the edge of nowhere' rather than the middle and it worked flawlessly. This was using a cellular hotspot so yet another hop. The counter party was in Amsterdam.

In the major cities I've never had a single problem bandwidth wise either so I really don't know how you are set up for roaming but I'd be looking at my provider rather than at the infrastructure, which as far as I can see is pretty good.

>> I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities

Did you use a local SIM?

Maybe is your network/roaming data plan. Some(most) networks throttle/restrict your bandwidth when in you are in roaming.

Formerly in telecom infrastructure; this is correct. Due to the way roaming works, pre-LTE you’d be routed back to your home country while roaming (still the same way on LTE depending on network config).

> Maybe is your network/roaming data plan. Some(most) networks throttle/restrict your bandwidth when in you are in roaming.

Could also be their phone, different regions use different LTE bands which often do not overlap at all, so if their phone is a US-only model it may only support US bands leading to dreadful connectivity even when the network itself is excellent.

And even when there are overlapping bands, those may only be used by some operators, so depending who you're roaming with you might still be hosed.

> I am struck by how irregular and slow cellular reception is, even in major cities (I’ve been in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Zurich in the past year)

Are you using an American phone? For Europe you'll ideally want something that supports bands 1, 3, 7 and 20; not all phones sold in the US necessarily will. Also, were you roaming? Some telcos will send all roaming traffic back to the home country (though this is no longer strictly necessary with LTE); this can indeed be pretty slow.

FWIW (using a European phone, on a network that does roaming sensibly), I've found LTE in Paris to be pretty good, and LTE in Germany to be a bit meh. And _awful_ in San Francisco (I'm not sure if it was a band issue, or if AT&T, who my network roams with, is just terrible).

Hah. I live on a hilly forested island. One of the secondary shopping centers has basically no coverage for at&t, no coverage indoors for t-mobile, and weak verizon coverage. Sprint has basically zero coverage of the whole island. When I bike around the island, I go in and out of coverage although I mostly follow the roads.

When we lose power, the towers shut off after 3-5 hours. Of course, that's better than my DSL which turns off instantly (I have a generator and a UPS for the DSL modem, but the remote terminal apparently doesn't)

We're in commuting distance to Seattle.

You probably have a phone with a limited coverage of European 3G/4G frequencies and/or need to change a setting on your phone.

These cities all have ok to good coverage, but if your phone can't match the frequencies you might have an issue (yes, it's ridiculous, and it's the same for some people visiting the US from Europe)

Most of the land area in the US is wilderness, though (okay, maybe half? Certainly at least a third).

We’re used to having coverage along major highways through long stretches of the country - yes - but as soon as you make a turn for a rural road and drive for a few miles you’ll lose signal.

The US is 5% wilderness (officially designated) but 97% rural.

My experience is that Milan and Paris are great, and London is terrible as far as mobile coverage goes. None of the other cities I have visited were remarkable. The countryside is somewhat variable, mostly depending on terrain (there are few spots genuinely without coverage).

I never had issues in the US, but I never ventured into the countryside either. At least mobile plans tend to be much cheaper in Europe compared to the US.

If you've been to Zurich and your mobile reception was bad, you either were using a bad provider or your phone has issues. I'm on the swisscom network, and the only time I lose 4G is when I go to the mountains.

And if what you say is true I suspect the provider dependency is also true in the US as I hit quite a few holes when using an AT&T sim card on a road trip through the US.

Not really. Though this was 7-11 years ago, I went to college in rural mass and the entire town had no cell signal. No data, no calling. Only dial-up for internet. The school itself paid for a cable line and a symmetric 10 mbit/s line was shared by the entire college. It was a shit show, to say the least.

The US is worse still. We had 1.5 days continuous driving without signal, including one town (Page). Also California, which is probably not the end of the world, I recall a tech centered region is there, right?, so it has more blind spots than people.

This aligns with my experience in London.

I spent a good couple hours troubleshooting my phone until someone told me the entire telecom had an outage.

Something I've never seen in the US.

This happened twice in the short time I was there and this was with their largest network provider.

> Something I've never seen in the US

T-Mobile: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/17/21293950/t-mobile-outage-...

Verizon: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/31/verizon-outage...

AT&T: https://www.kltv.com/2020/08/17/att-outage-affecting-custome...

Sprint: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2020/07/22/di...

All of them together: https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/15/t-mobile-att-verizon-outage/

Fair point - though in those cases they did make the news. (The entire US is also just a much bigger place with a lot more cities, but you’re right that I did make that comparison.)

The London outages seemed common enough to not be news.

Hard to say without more data though.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare carriers based on a unique outage; however the US does have something going for them: national roaming.

Typically carriers have arrangements between them to use competitors’ networks in areas where their own ones are unavailable.

This is unheard of in Europe which is a shame; it would be a much more efficient use of the spectrum if any subscriber could connect to any available carrier.

We have EU-wide roaming, so it’s not really unheard of. At the national level, it depends on local laws, though.

There was one large outage a couple of years ago. Other than that, I haven’t seen one in a decade. At least not at the level of the entire network; obviously local issues are more common, particularly in harsh weather.

I can take you to various streets on Long Island, NY that get no or extremely unreliable 4G from all carriers.

Afaik, your international coverage depends on the agreements your provider has with local networks.

It also depends on the phone itself. Different regions (and countries within those regions) use different LTE bands. Phones will generally support all bands within one region, but may not do so across regions.

Cell phones were widespread in Europe before they become so in the US.

In the "Bell System" phase US landline phone service really was "best in the world" because you had some public oversight over a private monopoly.

In 2000 in the U.S. you could pick up a landline phone that wasn't paid for, call the operator, and get your service turned on that day. At that time you could wait a few weeks in Germany to get a line installed or you could go to a cell phone shop and walk out with "a handy".

In the mobile age Europe pulled far ahead of the U.S. where mobile phones were held back by the stigma that texas oil wildcatter rich jerks had car phones in the 1970s.

> Cell phones were widespread in Europe before they become so in the US.

Are you using a small number of Western European nations as a proxy for all of Europe?

The US invented the mobile phone and deployed it very early on. 2/3 of Europe was too poor to afford mobile phones until the past 10-15 years. Eastern Europe only started getting widespread mobile phones with the rise of cheaper, high-function smartphones in the past five to seven years. The same is true in Russia.

The US matched most of Western Europe on 2G deployment, primarily lagging Germany, France and the UK. The US was far ahead of Europe on 4G deployment [1][2][3][4], and it's leading Europe on 5G deployment as well [5].

Western Europe's stumbles after 2G are why European tech companies have failed miserably to compete in mobile and the US de facto conquered that market in the West. It's why Apple today is a $2 trillion company (equal to 10 SAPs) and the old Nokia got killed off. Western Europe entirely squandered their brief 2G lead over the US.

[1] 2014 "Europe Struggles to Catch Up With U.S. on 4G Investment" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-struggles-to-catch-up-wi...

[2] 2013 "Europe lagging in 4G deployment" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/1028858...

[3] 2011 "Europe slow to adopt 4G mobile" - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms/europe-slow-to-a...

[4] 2013 "Europe Is Losing the 4G Race" - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324412604578515...

[5] "The real reason Europe is falling behind on 5G" ... "Over the last decade there has been considerable public support to promote 5G in Europe. But in actual rollouts, Europe is fast falling behind lead markets in North America, North East Asia and Australia."

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/12/borje-ekholm-5g-eur...

[5a] https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/9/can-europe-compete-i...

> Eastern Europe only started getting widespread mobile phones with the rise of cheaper, high-function smartphones in the past five to seven years.

This is not true at all. By about the turn of the millennium, from Romania to Poland pretty much everyone who was not elderly had a mobile phone. A basic Nokia model was not very expensive even by local standards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com