Serious Throughput Problems - Philly Area

[TheBigCheese]

I live in Philadelphia and get 5 bars of signal in my home and usually 300-500kbps download. Recently the speed has gotten progressively worse and today it was 37K down and 550k up !!! I called Sprint and they had me remove the battery and did some sort of network reset and when I restarted download was 1050kbps and upload was 890kbps!!! I was happy for two hours because it is now back to 30-50kbps with occasional speeds of about 170kbps. Upload is always 5-10X download speed which is really weird.

I called Sprint back and they fooled around and tried to blow me off by saying it was probably a network capacity issue and finally told me to go to the Sprint store to have them look at the phone.

Is there any explanation for this behavior? How can speed degrade so badly over a 5 day period?

[503ducati]

I live in Philadelphia and get 5 bars of signal in my home and usually 300-500kbps download. Recently the speed has gotten progressively worse and today it was 37K down and 550k up !!! I called Sprint and they had me remove the battery and did some sort of network reset and when I restarted download was 1050kbps and upload was 890kbps!!! I was happy for two hours because it is now back to 30-50kbps with occasional speeds of about 170kbps. Upload is always 5-10X download speed which is really weird.

I called Sprint back and they fooled around and tried to blow me off by saying it was probably a network capacity issue and finally told me to go to the Sprint store to have them look at the phone.

Is there any explanation for this behavior? How can speed degrade so badly over a 5 day period?

If you're simply doing "mobile speedtest.net", that app simply chooses the closest server. If you're tethered and go to speedtest.net you will get a different automatically chosen server with faster result. I myself go by how it streams video/audio, when I can get my EVO to roam I can still stream radio. I've found that mobile speedtest.net app is very very inaccurate in relation to performance hence the strange results.

When doing speed tests I've always found, regardless of carrier, tethering then testing via speedtest.net or speakeasy is much much more accurate.

[TheBigCheese]

I don't care about tethered speeds because my immediate problem is speed using the browser and apps on the phone. I very rarely tether. Anyway, the speed determined with a stopwatch while downloading a large file is pretty close to the one speedtest.net shows.