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Comment by jblow | Hacker News Reader

I don't even get 4G speeds almost ever. Bandwidth is always massively oversold. Often I can't even successfully load a random web page when I have 4+ bars of "4G".

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http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1154366377.

Just posted 22/9 40ms ping in DC Union Station. It's 7pm and the place is packed with people playing on their cell phones while waiting. Maybe blame SF NIMBYs for not letting the cell companies put up enough towers or run enough fiber backhaul?

To be fair, I've seen ISPs give special treatment for packets coming from speedtest.net. I'm looking at you Comcast.

Yes I've noticed the same thing. I ended up rolling my own test just to verify. I wish I was surprised comcast does this, but they totally do.

Doesn't speedtest use lots of mirrors that have different IPs and hostnames?

Actually, transportation hubs are usually outfitted with specialized microcells so the throughput is higher there even though the user density is large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcell

Okay, just 13/13 in my large apartment complex in downtown Baltimore. http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1154413210

What part of the country are you located in? I can get full 4G LTE speeds in the middle of nowhere Appalachia where my brother lives, via AT&T. Streaming HD video on my phone there is a non-issue.

San Francisco, both AT&T and Verizon. It's terrible here.

San Francisco has notoriously bad infrastructure due to all the NIMBYs blocking any kind of development. I don't think it's very representative.

With T-Mobile LTE in San Francisco, I get 20Mbps+ in a lot of locations, including about half my residence. (Unfortunately there are also a bunch of very-weak spots with low bandwidth and multi-second pings, and far more dead zones along highways in rural areas.)

Rural and T-Mobile just don't get along right now. A year ago, the entire I-5 corridor as I approached Oregon and through crater lake was invisible for data or calls (with a small band of

I am, however, hopeful that T-Mobile has this in their sights [1]. They have done more to improve mobile user experience in the past 2 years than the rest of the networks for the past 10.

Also super happy with T-Mobile's speed- it's faster (bandwidth-wise) than my stupid U-verse. But the whole text message issue they have is driving me nuts to the point that I'll probably switch to another carrier with less available bandwidth just to get sms that works.

What's the SMS issue?

Just tested my T-mobile. 8 Mbps down, 9 Mbps up one block from 1 Post Plaza.

I've got 15 down and 10 up in Rockport, MA

Streaming Netflix in Central London isn't an issue (I'm on Three); do you have a choice for a better provider?

What phone are you using? Some phones pawn off HSPA+ as "4G".

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