3G twelve years ago was fast. Today if you get a full 3G reception you can barely load Google’s landing page. Why’s that?

Question

I just feel like they renamed 4G into 5G, 3G into 4G and Edge into 3G.
Jokes aside, I know the overall amount of data to load today per website/video/images is way heavier than before, but still. A simple Google search doesn’t require much more to load than 12 years ago.

In: 2211

Answer 1

Technically you’re partially correct. Providers never met the full IEEE spec capacity for their equipment throughput. I forget the exact numbers but say 4G was speed to provide 150mps without interference or what have you. Carriers never achieved that throughput. Instead capacity was limited to like 20 mbps. That’s sort of what 4G LTE was supposed to do-make up the difference. Now theres 5G, and it uses more communication bands, but those bands aren’t as reliable, and they’re still not maiking the IEEE throughput requirements