Originally Posted by jaffboy151:
“OK Devon, here's one to work out for me. Was getting speeds of 15mbps upload but only 0.4mbps download on three yesterday afternoon, given top speed on this mast can be 65-70mbps (max seen by me is 68mbps) how many active users would you say this mast sector was dealing with?”
Far too many variables to take into account to know.
What I don't really know is how well LTE copes with more than the maximum number of users. Clearly the cell has to rapidly switch groups of handsets from active to inactive and back which must impact hugely on throughput but I don't really think this is even happening most of the time anyway since in urban areas there's probably an adjacent cell you could be pushed to with a spare active slot.
I mean 10Mhz of 3G seems to cope pretty well most of the time and that has way less overall capacity.
In cities cells are fairly dense and with 15 or 20Mhz per cell that's a lot of users that would need to be doing something high bandwidth before things got bad.
If you were on 3 and you've had 68meg then that must be 10 or 15Mhz of 1800.
One hell of a lot of users would have to be either doing a continuous download or watching video simultaneously before speeds got to half a meg.
I would put it more down to a fault or inadequate back-haul (legacy Microwave and waiting on fibre perhaps). That would only be 1-2Gbps for all 3 cells.
That combined with all the 3G users could screw it up I guess but I still question just how many people are doing a continuous lasting data transfer all at the same time.
The vast majority of transfers are tiny blips here and there. A 10KB pushed email, an iMessage, a couple of hundred KB Bookface page update and most handsets are doing nothing much more than they are doing something.
Someone will tell me this is crap now and most cells are dealing with 1000 users all watching youtube!!! Hahaha