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Comment by drozycki | Hacker News Reader

There’s a diner in SF I frequent. I usually sit 15 feet from the door, on a busy retail corridor, with Verizon premium network access. My iPhone XS reports two bars of LTE but there’s never enough throughout for DNS to resolve. Same at my dentist’s office. I hope to live in a post slow internet world one day, but that is still many years away.

(The XS does have an Intel modem, known to be inferior to the Qualcomm flagship of the era)

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I think this is a tough because a lot of bands have been repurposed for 5G and an Xs doesn’t support any of those.

I get 400 Mbps down standing at the door of that same diner. My understanding is that 4G bands are repurposed for 5G in rough proportion to the usage of 4G vs 5G devices at that tower, plus there’s some way to use a band for both. In any case I was having these indoor performance issues back in 2019. I’m pretty sure it’s an Intel issue, and any Qualcomm modem would be fine.

I see this in my french city, there's a particular spot on my commute where my phone (mediatek) will report 2 bars of 5G but speeds will actually be around 3G. I've also noticed other people on the tram having their videos buffer at that spot, so it's not just me. The carriers do not care, of course.

I think there's just some of these areas where operational conditions make the towers break in some specific way.

I mean, they're not breaking, they're just overloaded. Solution is generally to add more towers, but that's expensive.

What do we pay them for if not to build out our telecom towers?

It's very much not an overloading issue. This always happens, even at 3 AM.

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