Originally Posted by
lightspeed2398:
“Took my Pixel XL to Manchester. Got 3CA working fully. Hitting about 132mbps in Victoria Station and the surrounding area (incredibly busy at this time of year and a real achievement from EE in my mind) . https://twitter.com/lightspeed2398/s...63091543216129 got some nice screenshots on Twitter.
Vodafone even with B20+B1 CA were atrocious in the city yesterday, I mean appalling, under 5mbps most of the time. Dread to think what o2 were like.”
Yikes, didn't think Vodafone would preform quite as badly. I wonder if backhaul has anything to do with it, or it is purely a lack of B7/site density. I also dread to think how Vodafone users were coping on just B1 or B20, considering many won't have handsets that can do B1+20. I guess those users would have seen sub 5Mbps.
Originally Posted by Redcoat:
“In fairness, allowing for the significant difference between the two networks, I wouldn't describe "...under 5mbps most of the time" as appalling as with that speed around 99.9% of customers will not really notice any bottlenecks on their mobiles.”
Like Lightspeed says, the issue isn't so much 5Mbps now, but what that will mean in the future. I certainly remember Three performing at 5Mbps thinking this won't last long, and not long after it was performing at less than 2Mbps in some locations with fairly high latency.
Another issue is 5Mbps outdoors will not equal 5Mbps indoors. Yes I know there will be WiFi and such, but it's still a concern that needs to be fixed either with small cells, more B7 or high density.
Originally Posted by lightspeed2398:
“Was a noticeable slow down compared to EE and in some places the network was so bad that it wouldn't even attach to LTE. Kept getting kicked off to 3G which wasn't much better.
The point is though that the network doesn't have enough capacity and density, they need to get it resolved and there have been few signals that way. The data demands in big cities are only going up and if they can't handle them now what will that network be like in 6 months etc. There's a reason EE had 55MHz deployed and a denser network.”
Originally Posted by jonmorris:
“5Mbps should be enough to stream HD video, so it's certainly not terrible. Not great for people sending/receiving large files, such as using Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive or screen sharing, but certainly the average Joe will find it just fine - as long as the latency is low, so web pages and social media updates nice and quick.
Vodafone is doing a lot of 3CA work but in London, congestion means that in some locations you're still looking at speeds between 40-80, not 150-200 as you might elsewhere. And some locations are sub-5Mbps, just as is the case on EE and Three.
I've been meaning to do another network test video, but I've been to many locations that I did the original testing from early on after 4G launched and speeds have in many places gone down, considerably, not up.
These upgrades in many ways just take us back to where we were!”