Post your AT&T 4G Speed's :) - America's True Largest HSPA+ network

[jseah]

AT&T specifically said that although they are selling the cards, the LTE network wont be up until the end of the summer. Trust me, you'll know when its up when all the techblogs are posting speedtests of their review units.

That is kinda funny that they're selling LTE devices when they haven't even turned on LTE yet. I guess next week AT&T will start selling iPhone 5 and iPad 3 accessories too.

[CA]

If LTE isn't even up, then why is AT&T already selling LTE aircards? Chicago is supposed to be one of the 5 cities in the first wave.

They fallback, and IMO, they are depending on it. So now we'll have fallback, enhanced, and 3G only available in areas that we cherypick, but we're working around to disguising it by blaming it on the TMO buyout.

Signed

Pants on fire

[-banned-]

I have driven through some of the *ghettos* in Birmingham, AL and Atlanta, GA and gotten the fastest AT&T speeds, 3G HSPA+ speeds of well over 14Mbit/s.

i can vouch for that 100%....
Some of my fastest speeds on att and sprint are in the poor sides of town.... why..? Cause 99% of them are on metropcs leaving the top 4 providers traffic free which means high data speeds :-)

Now when i get the "normal" sides of town where the majority have one of the top 4 providers, then my speeds are always under 1m ...

[silentjudge]

That is kinda funny that they're selling LTE devices when they haven't even turned on LTE yet. I guess next week AT&T will start selling iPhone 5 and iPad 3 accessories too.

They want the illusion they have a 4G network and for a lot of users, they probably wont notice the difference between 4G LTE and FauxG.

The fact that a good percentage of iPhone 4 users already believe they get 4G proves that point.

Sent from my Inspire 4G

[timbre]

I talked with the Mobility C.O. Switching guys and they verified that LTE is indeed turned up in downtown Chicago but they couldn't verify the suburbs. I'm bringing my laptop and Momentum there tomorrow to see what I'mgetting. AT&T did say that they were turning it up as of Monday. The Mobility guys said that the switches are enabled but the traffic might still be inhibited.

[timbre]

Also I was in an AT&T chatroom for the Momentum. They said it won't say LTE yet; they will update the firmware. They couldn't confirm whether LTE was really turned up or not.

[jseah]

I talked with the Mobility C.O. Switching guys and they verified that LTE is indeed turned up in downtown Chicago but they couldn't verify the suburbs. I'm bringing my laptop and Momentum there tomorrow to see what I'mgetting. AT&T did say that they were turning it up as of Monday. The Mobility guys said that the switches are enabled but the traffic might still be inhibited.

If LTE was live, wouldn't AT&T issue a press release to say that it was live? I haven't seen anything yet.

[formercanuck]

Being in a *Rich* suburb doesn't entitle you to anything. Im from Holmby Hills, CA which the majority of people there have 10x more money than where your talking about and when I visit home, they have HORRIFIC coverage and speeds from all companies. The people are all snobs and block the installation of backhaul and new towers (which is why I don't associate them as *My People*))

On the other hand I have driven through some of the *ghettos* in Birmingham, AL and Atlanta, GA and gotten the fastest AT&T speeds, 3G HSPA+ speeds of well over 14Mbit/s.


If your looking for Speed right now, AT&T isn't the right company to be with anyways. They don't even have a *4G* network.

Rich residential neighborhoods aren't the prime spots for 4G.... high volume / business places are.
Eg. I'd expect 4G at Ohare, LAX, DFW before I'd expect it at somewhere like Holmby Hills/Los Altos Hills or other affluent residential areas. Many upscale residential areas are also NIMBY areas.

[Guest 171]

Rich residential neighborhoods aren't the prime spots for 4G.... high volume / business places are.
Eg. I'd expect 4G at Ohare, LAX, DFW before I'd expect it at somewhere like Holmby Hills/Los Altos Hills or other affluent residential areas. Many upscale residential areas are also NIMBY areas.

I would too, because most homes are going to have WiFi so its not really going to matter.

[milan03]

OK. I'm really happy and excited because for the last few days I've been testing AT&T's HSPA+ network, and I have to say, here in NYC things are moving forward! It looks like AT&T has finally moved to flat IP network since their HSPA+ latency is actually on par with T-Mobile's!!! I'm seeing ping on speedtest.net in the high 40's averaging around 60ms!! That's magnificent, coming from 100+ ms just a few weeks ago!
That said, the backhaul is still NOT in place here, although it's advertised as "enhanced backhaul" market just not LTE. Now if 14.4mbps rate limiting is what they call "enhanced" then maybe that's just as good as we'll ever get on AT&T's HSPA+. On my Shockwave and/or unlocked Huawei AirCards, I'm seeing speeds capping at 14.4 MAX! Using a well seeded torrent I'm averaging at around 1.3MB/s peaking at just about 1.8MB/s (14.4mbps). It looks like AT&T's backhaul is not abundant, and instead of properly deploying fiber to the sites and leasing sufficient amount of backhaul, instead they're definitely applying "rate limit" to all NYC users at 14.4mbps no matter what device we're using.
Here are some fresh screenshots:

Red Line separates AT&T's HSPA+ from my earlier in the day testing of Verizon's LTE:

[fraydog]

Is this actually improving AT&T's legendarily bad dropped call performance in New York as well? I know when AT&T had Root Metrics do a study for their NYC market, NYC had the worst score recorded for dropped call performance in any market since the inception of the Root studies. AT&T had closed gaps to competitors in other markets (SF being a key example where they actually finished 2nd to Verizon and ahead of T-Mobile and Sprint), but there was no such closing of the gap on the NYC front.

Any movement in that regard?

[milan03]

Is this actually improving AT&T's legendarily bad dropped call performance in New York as well?

Not really.

[zephxiii]

For some reason I highly doubt they are running "limited backhaul" in a place like NYC especially after swapping hardware out to run flat IP, prepping for LTE, running 4 carriers as it is and wanting to add a 5th (which suggest more need for spectrum/cell sites than anything).

hitting 14.4 max looks like something other than backhaul, like traffic shaping, rate limiting, or not hitting 64qam. I believe you have already demonstrated that there is some sort of traffic shaping/rate limiting already in use and there is going to be for LTE. It could be something like limiting devices to 10 of 15 HS-DSCH codes to reserve some spectrum for "other" signalling, this ironically would limit you to around 14mbps with 64qam etc.

Also must consider how locust's fastest HSPA+ on AT&T was also 14.xx mbps in a completely different state that is a different region, market, probably backhaul provider which kinda points to being some sort of limit.

but without actual inside knowledge or the proper tools you can't really know.

[zephxiii]

That is kinda funny that they're selling LTE devices when they haven't even turned on LTE yet. I guess next week AT&T will start selling iPhone 5 and iPad 3 accessories too.

Not really, it's best to start selling LTE capable devices now so that then LTE is lit up all those devices will move traffic off of the HSPA+ network and onto the new LTE network.

[-banned-]

Here is an odd test... 90% of the test it was sitting between 200-300k and then at the end spikes to 3M ....