Okay, so I've always got pretty good 3G data with Three - quite a lot of places I'm at I generally get above 15Mb/s. Where I have got 4G in the past, it's been worse than the 3G connection for data speed.

I had to go to the Riverside retail park on the outside of Northampton at lunchtime today. I saw there was 4G and did a speed test as I invariably do when I get to a 4G area. I was very pleasantly surprised - 47.82Mb/s download, 21.31Mb/s upload...

This is the fastest Three 4G speed I've seen to doubt, and latency wasn't too bad at 51ms. Hoping this is the start of the ramp up of 4G for Three!

Yeah but once you have downloaded more than 1 kilobyte using 4G, you will of course be a selfish data hogger and you will be sent to the data highway sin bin and be capped to 3G speeds

I don't expect Three is ramping up their 4G speeds, I know a few spots where I can get over 30mbps on Three, I've seen at most 46mbps. All in areas where there's not much around so there's not much usage.



I'm at 48GB data used this month so far

Fastest speed I've had on Three 4G was 66.83mbps in Shepherd;s Bush last November. It was in the garden of a pub near me that I declined to name to Three on Twitter because I didn't want them slowing it down.

That was absolutely exceptional though. The most I've had outside that one spot was around 30mbps in a park in Fulham - otherwise anything over 15mbps is considered good. All of these are in West London, so the signal's probably fairly busy.

Why does anyone need such fast speeds though, considering that heavy data use on a smartphone is mainly streaming video and that only needs to be fast enough to keep up with how fast the video is playing so it doesn't buffer.

Cooler - I agree, and to be honest I'm more than happy with 15Mb/s+ (for the moment no doubt this won't be the case a year or two form now)...

This for me was more about noticing how 4G - for the first time I've seen it - has been faster than Three's HSDPA (for me). 4G is pointless to me when it's slower than 3G data, if that makes sense?

For single data loads (eg Web pages, rss feeds, upload or download of fixed size data) then it's completed quicker and the radio can return to idle far faster, saving power.

For streaming, more capacity for concurrent users in a given space and /or less time spent buffering. So less time burning power to display a blank screen.

Only the latency affects web page loads, not the speed of the connection as TCP has something called slow start or exponential growth, that algorithm takes a little while to work out what speed the connection can support

It takes as long as loading a typical web page to calculate and speed capability of the network between client and server meaning the actual speed of the page loads is barely impacted by the speed of the internet connection.

Meh... The University of Surrey's 5G Innovation Centre just managed one terabit per second!

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Get this speed on my journey into work passing a 4g mast in Telford Shropshire https://www.dropbox.com/s/0fm8nm39sw...58.30.png?dl=0
Brilliant speeds, drops down massively during peak hours, but I'd happily swap it for 5-10mbps 800mhz coverage in more areas, unbelievably 100 yards further down the road is 3g only on a none happy mast which gives a stunning zero data up to 0.02mbps!

Yeah latency is where it's at!
Thine is completely correct here.
Complex websites often pull data from say, 10 different databases and latency is the killer here.
On my crappy 1.7Mbps ADSL connection it feels pretty quick, pretty normal, since the actual amount of data being transferred is relatively low.
The same website on my 15Mbps EE 3G link (Huawei b593 router) takes noticeably longer to load.
ADSL latency - 28ms
3G latency - 81ms

Oh, and can Three do this?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltgu130e2c...34meg.png?dl=0

Sorry, couldn't help myself..
I'll get my coat....

EDIT: Actually, check out the ping time. I hadn't noticed that before!