4G LTE Coverage as of May 15, 2021 (AT&T, T-Mobile, UScellular, Verizon) | Hacker News Reader

4G LTE Coverage as of May 15, 2021 (AT&T, T-Mobile, UScellular, Verizon)

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24 pointswalterbell6 comments

I am in the internet-starved backwater that is a major Australian city, and despite living 3km from the city centre, I use 4G for all my home internet.

My carrier allows me to share 500GB between my family mobile SIMs and my home data SIM.

I am led to believe I have some dodgy copper wiring in my complex between the kerb and the property, but it is financially not worth repairing because 4G is everything I need. And the cost is comparable.

I feel like it's a wonder of the modern world that doesn't get enough praise.

Places like India are building out significantly less wire infrastructure because LTE is pretty good on its own.

For a country where most people pay $50+ per month for 4G, this coverage really is pretty poor. There are tens-of-mile wide gaps in coverage.

And even the places where there is coverage, the map can’t show how strong it is. The area around where I live is supposedly blanketed by AT&T and Verizon, but I’ve tried every network and never got more than two bars on any except Sprint (thanks, T-Mobile).

And even where there is coverage it frequently barely works. Many of the mountain areas around me have great signal strength but we're lucky to get 100KB/s download speed.

If you really want to be sad about the situation. When I had gone to Norway on project fi I had minimum of 4 bars anywhere I went too of mountains, tunnels under mountains miles long and out on the boats between ports.

Now Norway is the size of about the California and probably easier to cover one could say but the population far less and I can’t imagine what the telcos bring in per user which doesn’t even even go towards their infrastructure.

US mobile and internet cover is crap and will need regulatory intervention if we want to get it in rural areas IMO.

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