US Rank Drops To 55th In 4G LTE Speeds 70
alphadogg writes: The U.S. has fallen to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have leapfrogged some early adopters of the popular cellular system. The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country's global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries enjoyed much larger gains.
USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
In your face, Indonesia!
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i can't LTE (Score:3)
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It's all about "learned helplessness" these days.
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maybe he should take it AAMCO (Score:2)
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we may be 55th in speed but due to hard work our carriers are #1 in Prices charged (in their favor)
On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
USA is near the top in LTE penetration. It's easy to have high speeds when you've got the tower to yourself...
Re:On the other hand... (Score:5, Funny)
So, everybody is getting screwed by the carriers then?
Re:On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
pretty sure LTE penetration is high in South Korea and they still have high speed.
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Re:On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or in most of the other cities, or along the highways between the cities. South Korea's coverage seems to be rather good actually [mobileworldlive.com]
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The US is #10 for coverage:
Subscribers in the U.S. are on LTE 78 percent of the time, on average, making the country No. 10 for what OpenSignal calls "time coverage."
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Right, what's the big deal here? With 10Mbps average, you can more than saturate a crappy mobile CPU chugging while loading a modern javascript webpage. You won't get any faster load times than on Wifi!
I know that I can't tell the difference between 10 and 100 Mbps for basic web browsing, or watching video. So long as you typically get 10 Mbps, is being "slower than other countries" all that bad?
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Isn't 10 Mbps an average? That also means that sometimes you get much less.
Also, for tethering more than 10 Mbps can be useful.
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Are you saying that because there are several competing cell carriers that either share physical tower space or have to worry about spectrum and radiation patterns, that it makes it harder to get high speed connectivity because of congested airwaves?
Last time I checked the various companies didn't use each others' spectrum except under-license.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are several potential reasons for high average speeds, including:
* The country has built an excellent LTE network.
* The network is underutilized because LTE phones or plans are expensive or not yet widely adopted.
* The network has limited coverage; a country with fast LTE in cities and 2G in sparser districts will counterintuitively have a higher average LTE speed than another country with fast LTE in cities and slower LTE in the back country.
* The country is as a whole densely populated with few rural areas pulling down the average speed.
In short, 'average LTE speed' is a rather useless datum without the necessary context.
Re: On the other hand... (Score:2)
Indeed. And when LTE was still in its infancy here in the States, I regularly saw 25Mbps on Verizon.
Re: On the other hand... (Score:2)
Hell yeah. Other countries are just the tip with LTE. USA! USA! USA!
Sure 55 *sounds* bad... (Score:4, Funny)
But, hey, we are still in the top 1/3 out of ALL countries in the world...
Size Matters (Score:2)
I keep saying this, but a small European Country having really good stats, isn't the same as the USA having mediocre stats. Have you seen the size of the US vs Europe?
https://becovegan.files.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
However, since I don't have a list of countries that beat the US, my assumption is that at least some of them are european.
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Look socialism/gun control/etc. works so well among these 100 people that all look and act the same, why can't it work in American?
San Marino and Liechtenstein are not typical European nations.
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300,000 cell sites in USA and about 75,000 in Brazil, so penetration is not comparable.
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It does have everything to do with the population density and the populated parts (especially the coasts) of the US are no different to certain EU countries.
The US does have vast areas that are sparsely populated were coverage is going to be expensive, such areas are less prevalent in western Europe.
I am not sure how they calculated but am fairly sure that availability is going to add up more in the denser populated areas.
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There is no "size" issue.
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Nice job leaving HALF of Norway and Sweden out, and whole Finland out! (which is size of the whole damn east coast!!)... btw, Finland has 98% 3G coverage (and is most loosely populated country in EU) and 4G catching up with that pretty fast....
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Have you seen the size of the US vs approximately 1/3 of Europe?
TFTFY.
Re: Speed vs Availibility. (Score:2)
For most part 3g speeds in Finland are faster than the average 4g speed in US...
Typo (Score:2)
How was the survey conducted? (Score:2)
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I live in a semi-rural area outside of Brisbane and just pulled 26.87 Mbps down 21.89 Mbps on Testra according to ookla Speedtest. At the same time my ADSL is synced at 22.696 down .940 up. I'm lucky though as the digital rim is literally at the end of my driveway.
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Samford Valley. I am one of the lucky ones here as lots of people are on wireless or have 11km cable runs. I just happen to have a digital rim at the end of my driveway so I'm on 140m cable length.
10..9 mbs. how about ZERO mbs (Score:2)
In the dallas fort worth airport hyatt many brands of phones get no reception at all. it's a joke.
It's annoying to go from the "modern world" back to the 1980s when you travel about 10 miles.
Rank is meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 90 Mbps, then 10 Mbps sucks.
Rank on an arbitrary list is meaningless. If you want to compare against a distribution, compare to the distribution itself. Not some arbitrary index. The distribution is linked in TFA [opensignal.com] and is vastly more informative than TFA or TFS. In fact it's one of the best interactive data presentations I've ever seen. It should've been linked as TFA, not some article talking about it.
Most of the countries are clustered between 8-18 Mbps. #43 (the previous U.S. rank) is 13 Mbps. If the U.S. were to increase its LTE speed by 50% to 15 Mbps it would jump to #28. And if it were to double its speed to 20 Mbps, it would jump to #12.