If LTE was the benchmark for mobile speed back in 2008, why is it seem virtually useless in 2024?

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LTE was touted as the fastest data connection when it was released in the US back in 2008 (as I recall)…but is now just about useless on some of the same sites in 2024.

Is it that they’re sun setting the technology and there’s not as much bandwidth available? Or, have modern websites bumped up their need for resources that much that LTE is no longer fast enough to power them?

It seems like a simple Google search on LTE is just about unusable. Even Craigslist, which doesn’t seem to have changed much in the past 20 years, barely loads.

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m a network engineer at a cell carrier and sunsetting is pretty much the answer.
LTE and 5G aren’t a single technology with a set speed but a collection of lots of different technologies that *can* achieve certain speeds in theory but it’s not necessarily guaranteed. Now that 5G is around, carriers are taking resources (spectrum, hardware, money) that used to be dedicated to LTE and using it for 5G instead.

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