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Comment by y04nn | Hacker News Reader

This is easy to have a lot of bandwidth when you only have 10s of users, but when the bandwidth will be shared between 10000 users will it plummet?

I remember when 4G was new and only few user where using it, it was very fast, but when more users arrived on the spectrum, the bandwidth per user decreased and the latency incised.

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I have been on EE 4G in central London (Westminster) for several years now while at work. A speed test back when it was new would get me 85/85 Mb, these days, with a much more capable device, I am lucky if I get 15/30 Mb (download is being taxed more). It's not horrific, but it's a far cry from what I was advertised when I started. I guess I'll just upgrade to their 5G plan and start the cycle again sigh

I’m on three. I’ve noticed the speed drop in town over the years. What’s really surprised me has been the lack of an increase since lockdown, even though the City is empty.

Which makes me suspect there’s something else going on rather than just undercapacity.

Chronic underinvestment across networks?

More and more users use 4G at home rather that WiFi. In general, home WiFi seems flaky, stops working in some rooms, cuts out if you go outside, etc.

It's often easier to just use 4G always.

Very interesting point. I've not been into the office since lockdown but I suspect if it was also the case with EE, they've probably shifted a lot of their backbone's bandwidth from the 4G network to 5G for that sweet marketing and word of mouth.

I remember when 4G launched here in Atlanta I could pull down 100Mbps no problem.

I still can (pulled 150mbps down as a test for this comment), but I could then too. Getting 150/30 to nearby servers.

I guess I live next to the tower lol.

Same. EE 4G in CENTRAL LONDON with a SIM-card Home Router and the speeds are horrific — mostly 5Mb, and maybe 15Mb for an hour or two each day.

Used to be consistently 50Mb+ back in the days.

Is 15Mbit really such a horrible speed? For a mobile device I think that’s still great.

They're talking about a home router with a sim card. I'd say 15Mb is pretty poor for home use.

It may be better than some wired home broadband in parts of London though (I used to get 3Mb/0.2Mb in zone 3).

I think they throttled all users to get them to pay for their "double speed" plan upgrade.

I've asked them this outright, several times and they've always denied it. They deny any throttling.

I also remember that. I had a WiMax dongle that I got when they first came out (Internet while commuting, how novel!), and it was very very fast. I was blown away. A few months later, the first WiMax phone came out (yeah...) and the network became completely unusable. Sprint actually ended up giving me a full refund, it failed that badly.

It depends what is limiting the speed... The limits might be due to regulations like "The user terminals may not transmit with more than X watts". If that's the case, more users might lead to a (nearly) linear increase in performance.

There are suggestions that traffic from user A might go up to a satelite, then down to user B, up to another satellite, and then down to the ground station.

If that's the case, more users leads to more efficient paths and potentially a higher peak throughput for each user (assuming most links are idle most of the time, which they are).

Starlink might even be affected by rain and weather conditions like some old wimax internet. I haven't seen any information about this regarding starlink.

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