Gman9831
I'm no Senior
Bold @start of new paragraph. Original: http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless....s-lte-speed-race-metropcs-stumbles/2013-02-13
AT&T can claim the U.S. LTE title with its customers enjoying avg DL speeds of 13mbps, far outpacing data speeds experienced by customers of its rivals. Regional operator MetroPCS, on the other hand in last place with LTE DL speeds of 1.2mbps, according to an industry vendor.
The LTE speed results were gathered by OpenSignal via its mobile application, which has been DL'd globally 3mill times and delivers crowd-sourced usage data. "It's real world, measured customer experience data," said Brendan Gill, OpenSignal CEO.
OpenSignal's data was gathered over the whole of 2012 & into early 2013."1 reason we wanted to use a broad time spread was that we don't want speeds to be inflated for new networks that don't have that many customers using the capacity at inception," Gill told FierceBroadbandWireless.
OpenSignal stressed that its methodology is affected considerably by device variance. "This goes some way towards explaining why MetroPCS registers such slow speeds, its users are generally on low spec devices".
OpenSignal said its data shows MetroPCS is the slowest LTE network on high-end devices as well. "This is likely explained by the fact that MetroPCS is using a 5MHz channel while most U.S. carriers are using 20MHz that are capable of higher speeds" said the company.
OpenSignal measured Verizon's avg LTE DL speed @10mbps while Sprint's LTE network came in @7.7Mbps. Sprint is launching LTE in the 1900MHz G Block, where it holds a 5x5MHz block of spectrum. Verizon & AT&T both are launching in 700MHz spectrum with mostly 10x10MHz blocks.
The 2 U.S. operators routinely trade places in mobile broadband speed tests. Last year, PCWorld said its tests showed AT&T had the fastest 4G download speeds of any carrier @ 9.12Mbps. In September 2012, wireless testing company RootMetrics reported Verizon's data network (combined LTE & CDMA EV-DO) was the fastest with average supported downlink speeds of 13Mbps & uplink speeds of 7Mbps.
OpenSignal said the average LTE download speed in the United States was 9.6Mbps while globally it was 10.4Mbps. Sweden has the fastest LTE avg speed, averaging 22.1Mbps, while Japan, surprisingly, turned in the slowest at 7.1Mbps. Sweden's results were boosted by the 24.4Mbps speeds delivered by S Comviq, which outpaced Telia's 16.6Mbps. Japan's results were dragged down by NTT DoCoMo's dismal 5.5Mbps speed rating. Softbank delivered 16.2Mbps, while KDDI came in @14.8Mbps, according to OpenSignal.
OpenSignal found that the nations with the fastest average speeds tend to be ones where the population is heavily concentrated in a small number of urban centers. "Countries with a population that is more evenly spread seem to perform slightly worse, perhaps due to the difficulty of rolling-out LTE over a larger geographic area," said the vendor.
OpenSignal said recorded LTE speeds were three times faster than HSPA+ speeds as well as Wi-Fi. "When comparing the speed of LTE to Wi-Fi it is important to remember that the 3.2Mbps figure is a global average and therefore contains within it a vast spread of infrastructures and technologies. That is not to say that LTE is faster than Wi-Fi, but this chart does point towards exciting possibilities for countries that are bypassing fixed-line internet service provision," said the company.
LTE also beat out HSPA+ and Wi-Fi in terms of latency. "With faster pings, LTE offers vastly improved performance for VOIP services like Skype," said OpenSignal.
Another study this week, Juniper Research reported global LTE revenues are expected to reach $340bill in 2017, compared to just over $75bill this year. "This figure will represent 31% of total service revenues from mobile services of all generations (2G/3G/4G) at that time and reflects the continued success of LTE in serving higher value subscribers," said Juniper.
Through 2017, almost 70% of LTE revenues will continue to be generated by N.A. & Far Eastern & China markets, added the firm.