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
>Is it that they’re sun setting the technology and there’s not as much bandwidth available?
Yep, pretty much. Stuff that breaks doesn’t always get replaced either.
Average web site weight in 2012 was around 200 kilobytes. In 2022 that rose to 2000 kilobytes, so basically 10x increase. Now, if you as a company aim to have your page load in 2 seconds but be fancy looking, you will take into consideration the average internet speed of your users. Since the speed is increasing, it allows you to create heavier pages. Thus, over time, that super fast LTE connection that you had back then needs to be 10 times faster to load the page today.
Both. LTE isn’t as fast as it used to be, but also websites are more bloated and have multiple times more data.
Since 2008, there are a lot more wireless devices being used. Bandwidth is a limited resource. LTE can no longer support the increased demand for data on an ever increasing number of devices. Hence 5g was created.
I don’t think LTE is the issue, I think it’s bandwidth. If the cell tower isn’t crowded LTE can easily hit 50+mbp or higher. 5g has higher speeds in theory but most of the time it’s bogged down like LTE and pretty similar in speed (at least in my area) due to the amount of devices trying to connect to a cell tower.
My original comment was too eli5 so it was auto deleted so I’ll write more words.
Cellular is several big businesses all working towards a common cause. Have a monthly plan and upgrade your phone often. So it’s good for the people making money to always have new shiny things that work better and faster. It’s better for phone manufacturing to have better technology to offer customers that previous generations can’t access. It’s better to be able to offer a better, exclusive product.
Mostly, it’s more profitable to focus support on new than maintain older things longer. By not upgrading old tech to work at the same level, it helps the company make more money today.
You need to remember the baseline was the EDGE network which the original iphone ran off of. The upgrade from that was bumped straight to the iphone 3G because having 3G was such a damn upgrade at the time.
LTE is not useless. When LTE came out majority phones were 3G, early adopters used LTE on a tower that wasn’t crowded. As more and more people got LTE phones, towers got crowded and per device speed reduced. Same case will happen with 5G.
It is likely the limitations of your local networks and carriers rather than the technology itself.
They purposely sunset technology to finance and justify their investments in new infrastructure and standards/protocols. LTE is fully capable of the things you describe, and is still one of the primary cellular standards in use across the globe.
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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