Your "usual" sounds more normal for a 2x10mhz allocation, your best speed must have had almost nobody else using it

Thanks. That does some a good reason. Although *not* a good reason for charging people more for what is effectively an infrastructure change to help the operators cut running costs.

In theory the price cut in the mid 2000's after the "3g rollout" (which as we know wasn't started by some networks!) was the problem.

The infrastructure is always being upgraded/repaired/replaced, and so the costs should remain the same. The £10/m plans were insane and stopped investment.

Wavejock would hate you jchamier

It matches my home broadband speed.

lol - most likely, but that's what ignore lists are for.

I don't work anywhere near the mobile phone industry, but I do work for a large US IT company that does sell a lot of technical hardware.

I don't think he ever worked out how to use them though, he told most of the forum that they were on ignore, but then kept repeatedly replying to them!

Oh jock, we hardly knew ye.

900MHz was working well on O2 3G inside Halfords in Basingstoke today. The same strength as 2G (GPRS!). No 4G indoors though, step outside full bars.

Similar to some shops in Farnborough area where I see indoors EE 3G and outdoors EE 4G and I always assumed this was because there were more 3G masts.

Indeed. When I was on three I asked pretty much the same question as the OP, mainly because I could never get anything better than a H+ signal. Then I recently moved on to EE and u get 4g pretty much everywhere I go. The speed is 5 times faster than my own home broadband lol.
The result is little to no buffering on videos, they load up faster and sound quality is better too.
Browsing is faster as well.
Only gripe is 2g allowance per month is nowhere near enough

Are you sure this is correct?
As far as I was aware LTE can handle 200 devices in a single 5Mhz slice of spectrum.
400 devices in 10Mhz and 800 in 20Mhz.
Per cell (sector) of course.

I just looked up my notes and I was way out - apologies, my notes are from a couple of years old - that's what I get from trying to do this from memory

2G sector - 80 sessions (smartphones with data connections)
3G sector - 400 sessions (smartphones with data connections)
4G sector - 1,000 sessions (smartphones with data connections)

I assume a sector is a direction on a mast.

Yeah also called a cell. Most large Macros have 3 cells, 120 degrees each.
1000 for 4G would require more than 20Mhz of bandwidth though.
As I said a single 5Mhz slice can do 200 devices so 20Mhz can do 800.

What I am unsure of is if you have 800 phones connected to 20Mhz, do they all have 20Mhz or 5Mhz?
In other words does a single handset only get full (20Mhz) bandwidth as long as there are no more than 200 devices?.
So 200 devices would get 20Mhz but 400 devices would get 10Mhz? I you see what I mean.
I would imagine this is the case.

but inst the other advantage that LTE is all packet data whereas the older protocols were circuit based - so inherently LTE can share the spectrum much better?

Well 3G has both circuit switched and packet switched sides but the CS side impacts on the PS side reducing latency.
As far as sharing is concerned 3G has all devices in a cell sharing the same 5Mhz at the same time with data packets only being identified by their headers as being destined for a particular device. This is not very efficient.
As more devices join, things slow down and ultimately the cell reigns itself in dumping users on the edge of coverage.

LTE allocates each device separate download and upload channels using multiple Khz sub carriers.
Spectral efficiency is greatly increased and more users joining doesn't adversely affect overall throughput per device.

That explains it thanks

Try googling what the symbols mean on your phone before ranting....

G and E are 2G
3G, H and H+ are various forms of 3G (from slowest to fastest)


That is unsurprising as the 3G indicator on Android means old fashioned 3G (around 300kbps) whereas H+ can go up to 30mbps!.


Because 1G was turned off a long time ago. That was the analogue service. 3G is an old standard that usually runs on higher frequencies, so lots more masts are needed. 4G goes further on lower frequencies with faster speeds. 1 bar of 3G can mean 1 megabit, but one bar of 4G can mean 15 megabits. It's a better standard. Why would you roll out slower 3G when you can put 4G in for less cost and a better service? Fail.

4G doesn't necessarily use lower frequencies.

EE currently use the same frequency as their 2G offering (and will only use 800 in rural locations) so if CSFB from 4G to 2G was 100% reliable, why not increase 4G power output to the same as 2G from same mast?

Show me one provider in the UK that is primarily using a band higher than 2100mHz for the majority of their 4G rollout?

That's right. There isn't one. 2600 is being used in large cities for LTE-A and small cells.

Yes there is the caveat that voda and o2 are using some 3g 900, but even then, most of their 4g is at 800.

So not necessarily, but usually. Especially if you don't compare across providers.

Voda may have to roll out 2600 nationally for capacity. Its unclear today.

Perhaps, but going by their geographic 2100mhz 3G rollout, I don't see it happening any time soon.