Verizon is solid

[Jordan T]

AT&T's 14.4 handsets rarely hit anything consistently over 6mbit/s which for a network that is so *great*, is pretty pathetic. But thats besides the point and won't matter anyways end of this year/beginning of next year when Verizon has LTE where AT&T still has EDGE.

It's NOT 14.4. I dunno who first said 14.4 but it has NO basis in reality. 14.0 is bad binary math (assuming 1000kbit in an mbit when it should be 1024). The real number is 13.6mbit/s for the so called "14.0/14.4" handsets.

Then, you have to remember that's PHY layer speed (physical layer). Protocol overhead keeps that from being possibly in real life, even under perfect radio conditions.

Then, you have to hit a code rate of 0.97 (basically 97% data), which requires a basically error-free stream and would be almost impossible in the real world.

Finally, you'd need a totally quiet channel to get all that data for yourself.

6mbps in the real world on a 13.6mbps channel is fantastic. It's all many people are seeing in the real world on Verizon's 100mbps LTE channel.

Far from pathetic, 6mbps (which I DO NOT consistently get in my area, 4ish is typical) gets you streaming HD video on Netflix. What more could you want on mobile?

UMTS/HSPA+ is a great solution in 2012, it's very fast, cheap, WIDELY AVAILABLE, and globally interoperable.

LTE is nice, but it's not really all that much better of an end user experience. The biggest benefits come in terms of efficiency, and even then, Rel. 8 is under 20% more efficient than UMTS with 64QAM and MIMO (Cat 20 and 28, not deployed yet). Rel 10 is where LTE will shine.

P.S. efficiency is good for the user because more efficient technologies, in theory, should mean lower prices and higher caps. That's playing out now - AT&T's higher throttle point for grandfathered users using LTE, Verizon's double data promotion. But I don't bet on those staying true in a few years...

LTE has major trade-offs - no global roaming (in LTE mode), power consumption (getting better), etc. These are improving, but getting better. For the same reason the first iPhone was a GSM phone in a time UMTS was coming out, the current iPhone is a CDMA/UMTS phone in a world that's going to LTE. But LTE isn't there yet, and Apple gets that. I'll keep my nice cute little iPhone until LTE chipsets are at that point - which will be this year, I'm sure.

[Danny4G]

I've had good experience with Verizon's 2G network which is the old network that handles all voice traffic. Most reliable.

3G network: It's everywhere but it is slow. Sometimes 200 Kbps slow in crowded areas but a bit faster in rural areas.

4G network: Fastest ever but boy lest we not forget how my blood boiled 5 or 6 times last year during those extended outages. Not the most reliable yet. I remember my engineers begging me to put them back on their older 3G MiFi's.

I cache the majority of my media (audio and video) on my AT&T phone that way I can listen/watch issue free even in areas with poor signal. I'm less likely to experience poor data speeds this way because I'm not aware of them.

My employer provides me with a Verizon 3G/4G MiFi device so I keep it in my car. When I go on long road trips out in the boonies I can connect my other phones to it assuming I'm in an area where Verizon's data signal is better than AT&T or T-Mobile. Thankfully I spend 95% of my life in urban areas so most carriers work just fine.

[chrisf8657]

One thing that made me switch to Verizon was they have 3g along the interstate from Phoenix to California while at&t has almost entirely edge. I haven't had a chance to test yet though because I just got my RAZR in December. But the biggest was in downtown Glendale Arizona - Verizon full bars and super fast data - my iPhone 3gs on at&t - 1 bar or no service - walk a block 3-4 bars but still crappy data speeds....even outside of that area I got less speed with 5 bars at my home on at&t than I do with Verizon evdo if I force it down to 3g.

At&t has fallen behind - way behind - IMHO.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[Jordan T]

AT&T has LTE in Phoenix and in LA now. Yes, there is a pretty nasty stretch of GSM/EDGE in Arizona tho... seems an odd place for AT&T to not upgrade...

[fraydog]

The key difference for the really rural users is that EV-DO is a decent fall back off LTE, while EDGE is crapy to fall back off of compared to UMTS/HSPA/LTE. Some of those areas Mark mentioned go straight from LTE to EDGE. Ouch.

[chrisf8657]

AT&T has LTE in Phoenix and in LA now. Yes, there is a pretty nasty stretch of GSM/EDGE in Arizona tho... seems an odd place for AT&T to not upgrade...

Yes I know At&T has their LTE up here : -)

Yeah but the problem didn't end there - my father's Verizon phone got a hell of alot better signal and data speed in Disneyland than my at&t iPhone did - where I lost signal in various places in the park his Verizon phone had signal and good data speed to look up stuff about the park...

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[Wireless Junkie]

It's NOT 14.4. I dunno who first said 14.4 but it has NO basis in reality. 14.0 is bad binary math (assuming 1000kbit in an mbit when it should be 1024). The real number is 13.6mbit/s for the so called "14.0/14.4" handsets.

Then, you have to remember that's PHY layer speed (physical layer). Protocol overhead keeps that from being possibly in real life, even under perfect radio conditions.

Then, you have to hit a code rate of 0.97 (basically 97% data), which requires a basically error-free stream and would be almost impossible in the real world.

Finally, you'd need a totally quiet channel to get all that data for yourself.

6mbps in the real world on a 13.6mbps channel is fantastic. It's all many people are seeing in the real world on Verizon's 100mbps LTE channel.

Far from pathetic, 6mbps (which I DO NOT consistently get in my area, 4ish is typical) gets you streaming HD video on Netflix. What more could you want on mobile?

UMTS/HSPA+ is a great solution in 2012, it's very fast, cheap, WIDELY AVAILABLE, and globally interoperable.

LTE is nice, but it's not really all that much better of an end user experience. The biggest benefits come in terms of efficiency, and even then, Rel. 8 is under 20% more efficient than UMTS with 64QAM and MIMO (Cat 20 and 28, not deployed yet). Rel 10 is where LTE will shine.

P.S. efficiency is good for the user because more efficient technologies, in theory, should mean lower prices and higher caps. That's playing out now - AT&T's higher throttle point for grandfathered users using LTE, Verizon's double data promotion. But I don't bet on those staying true in a few years...

LTE has major trade-offs - no global roaming (in LTE mode), power consumption (getting better), etc. These are improving, but getting better. For the same reason the first iPhone was a GSM phone in a time UMTS was coming out, the current iPhone is a CDMA/UMTS phone in a world that's going to LTE. But LTE isn't there yet, and Apple gets that. I'll keep my nice cute little iPhone until LTE chipsets are at that point - which will be this year, I'm sure.

Again you are comparing *theoretical* speed's, its not like QAM64 on HSPA+ is even effective in most radio conditions which was proven by Qualcomm which one user posted on here its not even used in the majority of HSPA+ radio traffic.

While HSPA+ is a cute interm solution till LTE is widely deployed, it is in no means nearly as good as LTE. LTE brings more than just speed to the table, it brings MIMO (something you will NEVER see with HSPA+ here), and everything broken down at the MAC level and is IP traffic and can be filtered through a media gateway to more efficiently prioritize graphics and video's.

But clearly HSPA+ isn't too widely available otherwise there wouldn't be so much EDGE around

btw, since we are having to be all technical HSPA 14.4 has 27952 bits/2 ms so in other words you would calculate that out to a maximum 13.976 MBit/s in perfect radio conditions.

[Airb330]

Yes I know At&T has their LTE up here : -)

Yeah but the problem didn't end there - my father's Verizon phone got a hell of alot better signal and data speed in Disneyland than my at&t iPhone did - where I lost signal in various places in the park his Verizon phone had signal and good data speed to look up stuff about the park...

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

Really?

I am not doubting at&t was horrible, but Verizon was atrocious last Easter (2011) at Disneyland. I was lucky to have 3G and most of the time it was useless. Signal wise, I was OK, but data would not work on 3G and was so slow on 1X it was useless too. Sprint worked fine on my husband's phone in '09 and '11 and Sprint was fine for me in 2009 as well. We stayed at the Hilton and the rest of the area it was fine. It was just useless in the parks themselves.

On another note....I really liked Cingular. Verizon let their Delaware network go to hell when I was in college and Cingular really came through for me for years. However, when 3G launched and I moved into Philly, forget it. The EDGE iPhone was OK, but on the 3G iPhone I dropped almost every call.

So yeah I have a soft spot for their GSM network, which is still good in Philly and Delaware. They really do have 2-3x more cell sites in a lot of areas in the Philly metro market, but I'd probably never use them again after experiencing their UMTS network in 2008...ugh it was truly terrible. It still seems horrible in NYC and other areas, but I'm not giving Verizon a pass for their shoddy PCS 3G network in suburban/rural areas either.

[chris4434]

I've found Verizon to be extremely solid in rural areas that no other carrier has service (in areas like south Georgia, parts of NC, ect) but in larger urban areas like Atlanta I've found far more places where AT&T (
and sometimes Sprint, T-Mo and Metro PCS) has not only a much stronger signal but also faster data speeds. Verizon seems to have far fewer cell sites in Atlanta compared to the other carriers and that is a big problem when you have tons of buildings that degrade the signal.
I would say from my experiences Verizon doesn't have nearly as much of advantage in urban areas, where they truly shine is the very large geographic coverage in rural areas.

[chrisf8657]

Really?

I am not doubting at&t was horrible, but Verizon was atrocious last Easter (2011) at Disneyland. I was lucky to have 3G and most of the time it was useless. Signal wise, I was OK, but data would not work on 3G and was so slow on 1X it was useless too. Sprint worked fine on my husband's phone in '09 and '11 and Sprint was fine for me in 2009 as well. We stayed at the Hilton and the rest of the area it was fine. It was just useless in the parks themselves.

Interesting indeed...wonder why we had such different experiences?

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[Airb330]

Interesting indeed...wonder why we had such different experiences?

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

Maybe they've improved since April 2011? It was Easter, so the crowds could have been worse. I didn't find the lines to be too outrageous (at least compared to our 2009 trip), so I'm not sure it was really that crowded. I know for a fact I had no service in Soarin', but other than that, voice was fine. 3G/1X data, even outside was unusable inside the parks though.

[Jordan T]

Again you are comparing *theoretical* speed's, its not like QAM64 on HSPA+ is even effective in most radio conditions which was proven by Qualcomm which one user posted on here its not even used in the majority of HSPA+ radio traffic.

While HSPA+ is a cute interm solution till LTE is widely deployed, it is in no means nearly as good as LTE. LTE brings more than just speed to the table, it brings MIMO (something you will NEVER see with HSPA+ here), and everything broken down at the MAC level and is IP traffic and can be filtered through a media gateway to more efficiently prioritize graphics and video's.

But clearly HSPA+ isn't too widely available otherwise there wouldn't be so much EDGE around

btw, since we are having to be all technical HSPA 14.4 has 27952 bits/2 ms so in other words you would calculate that out to a maximum 13.976 MBit/s in perfect radio conditions.

Your last line is what proves you have the bad binary math skills the people who call it 14.0mbps have. 13976kbps = 13.6484375mbps if you want to be really exact. Which rounds to 13.6, the number I stated.

And I said outright I was talking theoretical speeds. "cute"? Technology evolves. HSPA+ isn't LTE. But with adequate spectrum, it's good enough for most uses today. LTE is nice, but with the low caps, where's it's advantage to the consumer over HSPA+? Uncapped, streaming HD video would be a better experience on LTE for sure.

[BuffaloTF]

Your last line is what proves you have the bad binary math skills the people who call it 14.0mbps have. 13976kbps = 13.6484375mbps if you want to be really exact. Which rounds to 13.6, the number I stated.

And I said outright I was talking theoretical speeds. "cute"? Technology evolves. HSPA+ isn't LTE. But with adequate spectrum, it's good enough for most uses today. LTE is nice, but with the low caps, where's it's advantage to the consumer over HSPA+? Uncapped, streaming HD video would be a better experience on LTE for sure.

Whaaa? 13.976 Mbps... not kilobits... is 14311.424 kilobits, which is 14654898.176 bits.... and it is 14.4, the remaining bits between 13.976 and 14.4 are lost to forward error correction and enhanced pre-coding, which actually makes the payload get delivered faster, since the corrections are included in the stream.

[Jordan T]

BuffaloTF, it's not 13.976mbps. It's 13976kbps. Dude of many names did his math wrong. And what I'm quoting is the PHY layer speed, in the real world you'll never get close to that. I'm NOT accounting for error correction, but in Cat. 10 the max code rate is 0.97 (so basically, 3% of the stream to error correction). 13976/0.97 = 14408 kbps. I'd never solved that before. MAYBE that is where the 14.4 comes from, but if so, it's moronic. It's not where numbers like 21.1 (for Cat 14) and 3.1 (for EVDO rA) those are just PHY layer speeds in kbps wrongly divided by 1000 instead of 1024. You'll never even reach the PHY layer speed due to overhead. How the heck could they use bad math AND divide by the code rate to get 14.4? I still say it's more just a relic from dial-up getting into marketing . 14408kbps is 14.1mbps anyways, so 14.4 is still absurdly wrong.

Also, note that max code rate of 0.97? Good luck reaching that in anything other than one tower, no neighbors, no other users, standing right beside the tower. Maybe a remote site in the middle of a valley with no civilization around. LOL.

Dude of many names would be right to call me out for this, except I'm comparing apples to apples. I'm comparing UMTS theoretical PHY layer speeds to CDMA theoretical PHY layer speeds. 3.0mbps on EVDO rA is equally impossible in the real world.

[DRC72]

Verizon is not that solid here in CT.......... Yeah the coverage is good, but 3G voice quality has gone to ****. Their way oversold here.