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.
In: Technology
LTE can still reach speeds upwards of 20mbps. I’d have to double check any higher, but certainly 20 which is plenty fast for anything you’d want to do.
The issue is there are typically LOTS of factors that can impact that speed. Keep in mind you’re communicating with something that’s typically over a mile away from you. There might be trees, buildings, mountains, ect between you and that tower. You also want to consider the amount of people in the area. A tower close to the mall is gonna have a lot more people connected to it on Saturday afternoon than Monday morning. Another interesting thing most people don’t know…tower don’t radiate equally out in all directions. Some might, but many do not. Rather they shoot the signal out like a cone with the smaller point being at the tower, and expanding the farther out it goes. So say you may be really close to the tower, and have no obstructions, if the direction the antenna is pointed away from you, you won’t have a strong signal.
Of course there is still the question as to why was 50mbps amazing 10 years ago, and today people are getting 1000mbps( and even higher than that). Just generally everything uses more data. A picture today is a lot higher quality than it was 10 years ago…so to save it on your phone takes more space as well as if you send it, it’s a larger file than the older lower res one. Our movies today are streamed in 4k vs 720p, 4k uses much more data because of the increased resolution.
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