Fatty Brit 4G networks slow down. Too much Bacon, perhaps?

Does this mean going to be a good period to to stick with HDSPA/3g, in as much as there will be less and less contention on the same infrastructure?

And EE data is/was unreliable

My phone would show 3/4/5 bars and H+ and I would still not get download to operate. Upload was fine and often fast (say 5 Mbps).

Many calls, many texts, many phone restarts and tech support escalation and I finally switched to Three - ostensibly slower, ostensibly less coverage but I get data when there is a data connection, which is almost always.

Three give 4G for free (say that a few times when pissed) but it is not faster than 3G so I guess they suffer the same issue with loading. It does work though and I could drop the phone to 3G if it was bad.

Too much bacon.

It's not often those three words appear together in an El Reg article.

Boston USA resident here, I live in Allston which is a heavy college student neighborhood. This is purely anecdotal, but as soon as the school year starts and the students flood into the area, my ability to connect to the 4G network and maintain a connection seems to become highly unreliable. Every year I've wondered if a sudden load was causing the system to break down until it could dynamically adapt to the new user density distribution, but there doesn't seem to be a simple way to either test this or get Verizon to say anything useful.

"The good news is that as customers continue to sign up, we won’t necessarily see speeds fall any further. That’s because providers are hoisting more masts to cope with the extra demand."

We've been through this in the US. The tricky bits:

Will carriers keep up on turning down the number of 2G and 3G channels, and turn on more 4G, as usage shifts? This isn't as easy as it sounds; a new cell site may well have software defined radio, so the company could log in (perhaps even remotely), turn off the 2G and 3G and turn on 4G in it's place. Otherwise, it requires physical modifications to the cell site. Another tricky part, 3G uses at least 5mhz (paired) channels; if a carrier was running paired 20mhz of 3G, they can't turn it off a bit at a time, it's 25% at a time.

Will carriers actually keep up on building capacity sites, or focus on expansion of coverage, or neither one? I don't have anything to say to expand on this.

Here in the US:

T-Mobile has pretty much has focused on urban markets; they've been upgraded, re-upgraded, and re-re-upgraded (including adding sites); very fast HSPA+ (at least dual-channel in most markets) and very fast LTE... in a given city, but EDGE and even GPRS outside the city proper. If you are in a HSPA+ or especially LTE coverage area, they are usually by far the fastest of the "big 4", but get out of that area and it may be T-Mo GPRS versus "other carrier" LTE 8-) They plan to upgrade these 1900mhz EDGE/GPRS sites to 1900mhz LTE in the next year or two.

Sprint has focused almost exclusively on expanding LTE coverage, they're running a minimal amount of LTE spectrum (I'm not sure if it's even 5mhz, it might be a 1.4mbps or 3mhz slice) but trying to get it over their whole network. They do have plans to use 1900mhz and other spectrum to add to LTE, but Sprint accelerates, cancels, or changes buildout plans so often, who knows what they'll do?

VZW (Verizon Wireless) had focused on coverage, they already have nearly 100% of their network upgraded to LTE, one 10mhz 700mhz channel. However, some areas that got >75mbps peak at launch now get <1mbps, VZW is now having to focus on adding capacity and cell sites ASAP in these areas.

AT&T is somewhere in between VZW and T-Mo's strategy, not expanding as fast as VZW but faster than T-Mo; and not focusing on urban markets as much as T-Mo but more than VZW was when they were focuses on rural buildout.

East Anglia (well the chunk I was visiting) was strictly 2G from O2. My smartphone isn't smart/slow enough to be able to use 2G data. Bummer.

Next year, or maybe the decade after when O2 finally pull their finger out - will they jump to 4G or recycle some old 3G kit to keep the web fingers fingering?

I have buffer face lol

Now the other pesky 3G users

If people all got 4G only phones and no-one else was on my mast I could get 21Mbps. Or 42Mbps by 'bonding' two channels. On 3G

The 4G hype is hype. With an economical number of customers it will vary from rubbish to OK.

An important issue is if 5MHz or 20MHz channels. The 5MHz is 0.5Mbps to 21Mbps approx and and the 20MHz channels are about 2.5Mbps to 100Mbps approx.

Depending on number of users and signal quality!

Thats an overcrowded backbone.

As 4G demand increases, so should the capacity of the backbone fiber at each cell tower.

However, that does not ever happen.

If it is a shared backbone network connection between vendors on the same Cell Tower then it gets even worse.

The Cell service vendors are doing the same thing that cable internet providers do, oversell beyond capacity.

"If people all got 4G only phones and no-one else was on my mast I could get 21Mbps. Or 42Mbps by 'bonding' two channels. On 3G"

This is true. On Verizon's EVDO, I saw speeds bottom out probably a year ago, and it's been on it's way back up since. The data load has been shifting from 3G to 4G faster than total data use has increased. Some other carriers the 21mbps HSPA+ has sped up dramatically too.

"The 4G hype is hype. With an economical number of customers it will vary from rubbish to OK."

It's not really hype, the same amount of HSPA+ that can provide 42mbps total with HSPA+ gets over 80mbps with LTE (of course at the fringe it'l be pretty slow either way.) Nevertheless, HSPA+ is quite fast, and at times it makes perfectly good sense to use the "previous generation" tech as the load on it reduces.