back to article London best for 4G - who'd have thunk?

Data from Which? today reveals that London has the best 4G connectivity in Britain - but some of the worst average download speeds in Blighty. Folk in the capital are likely to get onto a network 70 per cent of the time, compared with 35 per for those in Wales, according to research in conjunction with Opensignal, which …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And where is LTE that USA have had for years? No where!

    1. Anonymous Blowhard

      And where is LTE that USA have had for years? No where!

      ??

      4G is LTE

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        From Macrumors: "LTE is 4G but 4G isn't necessarily LTE. For AT&T there are two types of 4G

        HSPA+, which is branded as 4G even though it's not much faster than 3G, and LTE which is the 4G we all know and love. So when your iPhone shows 4G, expect significantly slower speeds than when it shows LTE (although they'll both be faster than 3G)"

        And what Three UK says: "Let’s be absolutely clear – this isn’t 4G as in Long Term Evolution, or LTE as it’s also known. Instead it’s the leading-edge version of 3G technology – HSPA+ but running on the 42Mbps technical standard, and offering customers twice the speed potential as the 21Mbps technical standard," Three said in a statement.

        My question is when is the UK getting real LTE? In the US you get 100Mbps in all major cities with it. In maybe 1 or 2 parts of Glasgow which have 4G you might get 20Mbps. So it definitely is not the same, just from experience using a mobile device in USA everything is instant but in the UK there is always a huge lag on anything you try to do and a lot of the time just give up.

  2. Valerion

    Canada/USA better

    I spent 2 weeks driving around the USA (and Canada) in the summer. Was about 2000 miles in total, and I can remember literally only one time where I didn't get 4G.

    Where I live - in the 'burbs of London, I can lose 4G walking to the end of the road. Yet over there often pretty much in the middle of nowhere - with the nearest civilisation about 5000 miles to the East - it was flawless.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Canada/USA better

      I spent 2 weeks driving around the USA (and Canada) in the summer. Was about 2000 miles in total

      If I spent two weeks driving around open spaces in london I'd get the same...building densities make a difference you know

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its 2016, ofcom - there should be Fines for 2G Consumer Data connections.

    Ofcom need enforce a policy of either free data if a Consumer's Smartphone connects only via 2G and actually would be better if the consumer was actually paid credit to consume 2G data in the way of a fine on operators.

    Ofcom seem to have forgotten that at the extreme scale, someone from the US, can be paying £7.50 per MB, for shitty roaming 2G data, with dropouts, forcing reloading of pages.

    There is no excuse for 2G data anywhere in the UK from any mast in terms of consumers/smartphone connections, given the subscription revenues each operator earns and the way the networks are advertised as 4G, Double Speed Data, etc, totally ignoring masts that are still 2G.

    My current experience of Wales, both Vodafone and o2 are 2G (Edge).

    EE are 4G and three are 3G/HSPDA, both EE and three's 3G are similar average throughput, though - 25Mbps. EE/three deliver from the same mast.

    Of course, its wise to remember that any 3G/4G mobile connection is always dependent on the backhaul over the rural BTWholesale backbone etc from the mast, which again, isn't vetted for bandwidth (it should be) by ofcom. i.e. situations where the backhaul is physically slower than the 3G/4G stated speeds shown between the Smartphone and mast.

  4. The Bit Wrangler

    Ofcom may be on it...

    I've installed the Ofcom Research app recently which is gathering data of my connectivity in the background. It's Android-only (because background iOS apps can't access the network apparently) and you kinda have to trust that they won't misuse the data but I do hope they'll get a good load of feedback and hold the operators to task if they can show their connectivity isn't up to muster.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ofcom may be on it...

      I do hope they'll get a good load of feedback and hold the operators to task if they can show their connectivity isn't up to muster.

      you hope Ofcom might hold ANYBODY to account? Have you just come through a wormhole from a parallel universe?

  5. Wyrdness

    What's your 4G speed

    So what kinds of 4G speeds are Reg readers getting?

    According to the Speedtest.net app on my phone, I'm getting 42Mbps in Isleworth (West London).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What's your 4G speed

      On Vodafone I get 110-120Mbps (!) download and 12-40Mbps upload indoors in Wandsworth.

      35Mbps download and 15.5Mbps upload indoors in Hayes.

      (Galaxy S7)

  6. dmitri

    4G is not the whole story

    Using all networks across the country I have noticed that whilst three may have the least 4G masts, overall you can more decent Internet 3g connectivity with speeds over 4mbs (sometimes as high as 12mbs) allowing me to listen sometimes with no interruptions to a high quality audio stream with no issues and sometimes steam video on the move, In London I get fast speeds using 3G than 4G. O2 on the other hand has lots of 2G coverage and no where near as good as Three/EE coverage while some areas have 4G many time I end up loosing Internet connectivity, great for phone calls but Internet not so good. Vodafone is a similar story to O2 but certainly in areas like much of Wales or west midlands no internet and patchy GPRS coverage. EE has come a long way for 12months ago and now does indeed in general have great 4G coverage and good 3G coverage other areas like Three.

    in Summary 4G is not the whole answer overall good reliable Internet ideally over 8MBs is needed when on the move in most areas for most smartphone use, no point in getting 40MB+ in one area then dropping to 2G with little or no internet elsewhere.

  7. Daedalus

    It's easy: just make your towns and hamlets robber barons

    People may have wondered why high speed data is so available in the USA. It's simple: there are cell antennas everywhere. But that's just the superficial explanation. The real reason - apart from a lower level of NIMBYism - is that in many places the locals can set up taxes on cell calls. If you have a cell tower in your jurisdiction - no matter how small - most states allow you to tax calls that use that tower.

    Now that's easier said than done, of course, but thanks to the spirit of entrepreneurship, it's something the towns, villages and hamlets can outsource to a collection company that then goes bothering the cell companies on their behalf. The collection company gets a percentage of the take, naturally. The upshot of this is that there is an industry of call record processing that uses software to access the records that telephone switching equipment can generate.

    It's a form of parasitism, but it certainly quells local arguments about cell towers. Often they are disguised as trees anyway, another advantage of living in a country with a landscape that is still quite wild.

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