I'm so confused, has Thine Wonk unintentionally defended a troll?

lol

You might have a point, I couldn't possibly comment (or could I )

Once you've got a reasonable average 3G speed of 5Mb/s speeds though if you've only got a 2GB allowance a month I don't see why you'd need so 80Mb/s speed where you'd use the allowance in a couple of minutes.

If you're going to use the 2GB over the course of the month as you suggested, then the data speed isn't really that important. Whilst GPRS sitting there churning downloading an app for 20 minutes might be a battery drain I doubt there would be much difference in battery drain between 5Mb/s and 80Mb/s.

It has always seemed odd to me that people go mad for crazy speeds and love running the speed tests, but with such low data caps you realistically get limited benefit, even with an 8GB cap you're really not going to be benefiting from the speed much otherwise even then you'd burn through the allowance in minutes still.

As I always say, there's nothing you can't do on a 5Mb/s connection that gives you much benefit over 80Mb/s, especially on a single device mobile phone with the kind of app size that is typical, or the kind of things phones do.

It's cool to test the speeds, it is possibly arguable that more capacity means faster speeds in congested areas or more future proofed, but even then it's a bit of a push of an argument as other networks have plans to keep up with demand too and if you're capped to 2, 4 GB etc then to me that is very restrictive and I'd rather have unlimited or a bigger allowance over pure speed.

It's a shame that EE don't give bigger allowances at the cost of speed, Three could give 500MB packages to all and end unlimited and everyone would get even better speeds, but I'd rather be able to use more data.

EE's customers use 1/4 the data use of Three customers, presumably because they are so restricted and have to watch their usage because of capped allowances and the cost of the bigger data packs.

Hold on, why does having 80Mb/s mean you'll automatically use your data in two minutes?

I often get 80Mbps but my 2GB lasts me all month. It's all relative.

It doesn't, but if you did make use of the 80Mb/s speeds then it would, if you're not making use of the speed then you may as well have 8Mb/s connection and be done with it. If you're not using it to download big files then it's fairly pointless as small files don't take long (seconds) to download anyway.

What do you mean make use? Isn't that what I just said?

Make use as in max that speed out. If you're just going to download little tiny apps and files or things that would download extremely quickly on an 8Mb/s connection, then you probably aren't going to be getting the benefit of an 80Mb/s connection.

On the play store and elsewhere stuff often doesn't get served that quick anyway! Even on EE double speed, whilst the speed tests may go full steam *(networks have been known to put those as higher priority network wise and peer with them), you often find the play store and other downloads only come down as 5-8Mb/s anyway!

Yes and I ran a speed test and it didn't use all my 2GBs...

EE doesn't meter speedtest.net but even then it's like 10s worth of usage and it still uses 50MB of data (1/40th of your allowance) if it was metered.

I did that on Vodafone.

So you could do 40 speed tests with that 2GB, in theory that could be used in 10 minutes. Or you could spread those out across the month.

Outside of speed testing you'll often find you only get 5-8Mb/s downloads on popular app stores or from email servers etc, in the real world over 8Mb/s seems to have almost no benefit *


*except speed tests, which the networks often policy route at top priority deliberately

Well no, that's not the case. You can download at maximum speed from Google Play.

I doubt it, find an app link for a large app then and time it and do the maths and you'll probably find it's not coming down anywhere near as fast as the speedtest.

Even large apps only take moments on an 8Mb/s, again leading me to question why you need those 80Mb/s speeds on a smartphone with a 2GB data cap.

I'm away from home in hotel using 4G tethering tonight, but when I'm home and on my 150Mb/s Virgin Media broadband, I'll find the biggest play store app I can see, curl it and see what speed it comes down at, I bet it's not 150Mb/s! At a guess without trying it I'll guess 10Mb/s, but I'll try it and report back.

Are you alanwarwic in disguise? Or has he taken over your log in?

Just because you disagree doesn't mean we're trolling, I'm trying to have logical and sensible discussion about the lack of need or reasoning behind a crazy fast connection on a mobile phone and the rather limited real world benefits it actually provides, especially on a 2GB capped plan.

Because good performance shows a sign of a healthy network, one that is able to handle the load if things get busy.

It also sells well for the networks too. Why would I go with a "premium" network like EE when I can't get good speeds? - even if it's an artificial speed limit and not congestion

I'm just bemused where this idea that Google's servers cannot provide fast speeds comes from.

Yeah it's pushing it a bit though, I see why people buy it because they like the speedtest dial and arguably the feel you're getting premium, where in the real world there's often no a big noticeable difference and you end up capped at 2GB or paying top whack for the big data allowances which are priced at £50 a month.

I have never really understood it, there *some* arguments, but none of them very strong.

There are tens of thousands of concurrent downloads being served from a massive Google cloud sitting on GCLOUD behind network load balancers, from there there will be hops to route over from Google, to middle networks and to your own ISPs bandwidth provider and then into your ISPs datacenter and out onto the RAN network and then over the air to your phone.

Any of the hops can have contention, and the servers themselves will just not be able to serve you at full speed in most cases. Each server might be serving 100 other files, it's rack switches, aggregation points, it's load balancers, it's bandwidth provider, peers, middle networks and other things will all impact the speed. Without testing admittedly (I'm willing to be wrong) I bet the speeds you get from Google play store downloads are significantly lower than the speedtests you're getting assuming you get 80Mb/s etc.

Oh did I mention my job is looking after 12 datacenters worth of applications on behalf of one of the world's largest companies. Do the test and I might be wrong, but I bet you don't get the same download speeds from the play store app downloads that you're seeing on speedtest (assuming v high speedtests)

I can see where both of you are coming from because to get a huge benefit from 4G you need a lot of data. But if all you do is watch occasional videos, browse the web, look at maps, and occasional app downloads like most people do, then you'll still benefit - things will load faster. But you won't benefit as much as if you were doing big app/file downloads where the difference would be a few minutes rather than a few seconds. That's just my opinion though.

Three have unlimited 4G data (no tethering anymore though). Although in my area (and probably most areas I'm guessing) their 4G coverage is pretty bad outside towns and cities where the others, especially EE, have much better 4G coverage.

Also in response to the original thread post, I don't think a network should be closed down because it doesn't have 4G. It's not like you're forced to go with them. I haven't used Virgin Mobile's 3G network but as they're an MVNO they will probably be slower than EE on 3G.

Pretty sure it does use your allowance. RootMetrics doesn't, but it's not as accurate.

I do a lot of speed tests and for me, fast speeds is important as I'm not just on forums, social media and streaming video (arguably you only need the speed to maintain a stream without pauses). I do a lot of file downloading and uploading, and for the latter especially, faster speeds are a godsend.

Surely that's why everyone wants faster speeds? Why we use microwave ovens to do baked potatoes instead of an ordinary oven, etc.

Actually I do agree that many downloads can be very slow from the Play Store, perhaps because of the routing and mirroring. I often do updates of apps very soon after they're released, so assume they've not spread as far and wide and my downloads are slower (possibly also due to demand).

If I download an app that's been on the store some time and is mirrored everywhere, it's really fast then.

Oh really? It's just that when I ran out of data on my EE sim the Internet and downloads stopped working, but speedtest worked! Maybe it was just a freak thing that applied only to me or something odd happened. I knew that RootMetrics tests weren't included and I thought it applied to speedtest, apologies.

I do see what you're saying, but I personally still think for a typical user a 6-10Mb/s connection with maybe a 40ms ping wouldn't be that much of a different experience to an 80Mb/s connection, and I personally favour allowance over fast but fixed at a relatively low amount.

I guess it is down to what people prefer for their circumstances.

Agreed and even the CDNs may not perform close to the speedtest servers, Google uses Akamai, as do the company I work for.

This is also why Google staggers OTA updates for Nexus devices. About a week apart for my 6P vs the one my wife has.