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
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.
> Or, have modern websites bumped up their need for resources that much that LTE is no longer fast enough to power them?
Pretty much. Just loading google.com, basically a text field and a button, now requires downloading 1.3 MB of Javascript. Back in 2008 it was probably on the order of 100 kB, and most of that would just be images.
We have more powerful devices that demand more data at faster speeds.
It’s all a matter of perspective and what we’re used to. In the days of dial up, after the few minutes it took to make a connection, we’d still be happy with an image that loaded in 1 minute. Nowadays we have several apps actively streaming or downloading data, and are unhappy about a page that doesn’t load in 1 second.
When I was in high school the whole school was connected with a 28800 modem. That’s 28kbit, or 0,028 megabit. It’s kind of crazy, but it was actually enough for what we did…
Where is LTE useless? I still do all kinds of browsing with it and all social media works fine.
Not sure where you guys are living, but I am still getting great speed with 4G. In all over Europe.
Verizon is actually disabling their “5G” (not 5G UW) services in most areas and reallocating the spectrum to LTE because it is more efficient than trying to run both services. LTE as a technology is far from useless.
LTE is still very useful. There are really very few use cases where you need more than the ca. 300 Mb/s that you can reasonably get out of an LTE uplink.
G5 has some other advantages, like (potentially) shorter ping times (good for fast-pace multiplayer games), more bandwidth to share (good if you live in a crowded environment) … but LTE is far from “useless”.
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