Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
AT&T 3G Faster Speed By Year End
- Thread starter Alchematron
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I'll believe it when I see it. There weren't any links that I saw to what prompted the article. However, 250 million sounds like everyone, so do they really plan to add this for the people living in the rural areas? If it's the cities, meh, for me.
I seriously LOL'ed at this comment:
I seriously LOL'ed at this comment:
See, this is what angers me about AT&T. They are thinking of adding more speed to the connection from your cellphone to the cell tower (that's cool) but not from the cell tower to the backbone!! 3G speed increases only make sense if the f*cking backhaul is there to support it!
Obviously in its current condition it is not. I for one, accept that. AT&T has to step up that fiber + ethernet deployment to cell towers if they wish for their service to truly be faster. No if they do that in unison with their software + hardware updates, then go for it.
On a side and more realistic note. How is AT&T going to deploy all those hardware upgrades when they are costly and the tech is about to be outdated? Surely it's better to just deploy the hardware for pre-4G LTE and get it over with.
Obviously in its current condition it is not. I for one, accept that. AT&T has to step up that fiber + ethernet deployment to cell towers if they wish for their service to truly be faster. No if they do that in unison with their software + hardware updates, then go for it.
On a side and more realistic note. How is AT&T going to deploy all those hardware upgrades when they are costly and the tech is about to be outdated? Surely it's better to just deploy the hardware for pre-4G LTE and get it over with.
I keep forgetting about the backhaul, even though kdarling constantly brings it up (at least I think it's usually him he knows a lot about it though). So, this could be utterly useless, but just sound good for a commercial.
It's me and him that bring the whole backhaul issue. He argues more in favour of Verizon technological advantage, which in my opinion is bogus as both (AT&T and Verizon) will require to make equal investment size to bring the networks to date. Hardware is never cheap and recycling, well that can leave many pains.
Agreed, I would be happy just to get service at home instead of only being able to use my phone when i am out somewhere.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm less interested in speed and more interested in not losing my signal. I've got 2 dead spots near where I live, and that came into play when I was chasing down some dude who hit my car with his and ran. Say I had been shot in that stretch or hit there and run off into a ditch and broken a leg or something. Fat lotta good 3.5Mbps would've done me.
I'm spoiled moving from a totally suburban county to one next door with more semi-rural areas. But I'm five minutes from a big state highway that thousands take every morning to head to work. I'm not in the boondocks. AT&T needs to shore up those dead zones more and worry about WE'RE SO FAST less.
They also need to stop touting the MicroCell as some solution for *only* $150. Stop trying to peddle your wares to fix something that FOR $116 A MONTH SHOULDN'T BE A BLOODY PROBLEM.
For those who claim that Verizon is all awesome, its network says it covers that area, but for the family plan it looks like all or nothing as far as text messages. Verizon gouges us on texts as well, so that would hardly help much.
I'm spoiled moving from a totally suburban county to one next door with more semi-rural areas. But I'm five minutes from a big state highway that thousands take every morning to head to work. I'm not in the boondocks. AT&T needs to shore up those dead zones more and worry about WE'RE SO FAST less.
They also need to stop touting the MicroCell as some solution for *only* $150. Stop trying to peddle your wares to fix something that FOR $116 A MONTH SHOULDN'T BE A BLOODY PROBLEM.
For those who claim that Verizon is all awesome, its network says it covers that area, but for the family plan it looks like all or nothing as far as text messages. Verizon gouges us on texts as well, so that would hardly help much.
AT&T really needs to fix their coverage. When I had an iPhone there were so many places in my area where signal was non-existent or EDGE only. Most classrooms on my college campus were deadzones, and if I did get a signal it was one terrible bar of EDGE which was useless for data. (My experience is on GSM the signal strength plays an important role in data speed / latency where CDMA the signal strength doesn't matter as long as there is a connection. Not sure if this is true or just my mind playing tricks on me).
I'll admit that when AT&T works, it works pretty well. It just seems that, in my experience, their coverage is like swiss cheese with holes everywhere. I remember being in a Wal-Mart with a full 3G signal outside, but inside the electronics section I couldn't use my barcode scanning app due to having a GPRS signal or whatever that hallow circle meant. I went to two A&M home football games and my phone was useless the entire game where everyone around me with Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon had no problems. I remember wanting to pull up information in class or waste time on Youtube yet that was always more frustrating than anything.
Fast means nothing if it doesn't work where and when you need it to. I'd much prefer a 1-1.5mbps with consistent service over a service that peaks to and above 5mbps but is flaky. It's not that important for me for my web pages to load in 7.2 seconds instead of 11.3 seconds.
I'll admit that when AT&T works, it works pretty well. It just seems that, in my experience, their coverage is like swiss cheese with holes everywhere. I remember being in a Wal-Mart with a full 3G signal outside, but inside the electronics section I couldn't use my barcode scanning app due to having a GPRS signal or whatever that hallow circle meant. I went to two A&M home football games and my phone was useless the entire game where everyone around me with Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon had no problems. I remember wanting to pull up information in class or waste time on Youtube yet that was always more frustrating than anything.
Fast means nothing if it doesn't work where and when you need it to. I'd much prefer a 1-1.5mbps with consistent service over a service that peaks to and above 5mbps but is flaky. It's not that important for me for my web pages to load in 7.2 seconds instead of 11.3 seconds.
does that also include an increase in coverage, or is it just an "upgrade" over the current areas covered?
I'll believe it when I see it, assuming I still care and have AT&T by then. My contract is up in June and my iPhone is an iPod when I'm at home so I'm not really seeing any compelling reason to sign another contract with a company that's great with excuses and little else. If Apple continues to pretend AT&T is god's gift to the cellular world then to hell with them too.
When AT&T updated from 3.6mbps to the 7.2mbps standards my speeds went from about 700kbps to 1.6mbps (on a good day, in a non congested area)
Didn't AT&T use a 1.8mbps standard before the 3.6mbps? I seem to remember my speeds when my town first got 3g was around 350kbps.
Its sad to see that we can never get anything close to the mythical "7.2" mbps... but I am always happy to see AT&T is still working on things.
The new problem is will AT&T and the new iphone both support this standard together?
Seems like I could expect ~3mbps if this was all true?
I am a bit confused on how just updating some software on cell towers magically makes them faster... Aren't we already maximizing the spectrum we have? How can this update magically make things twice as fast?
And man have we come a long way from the 200kbps EDGE network we all use don the iPhone in 2007. (more like 125kbps)
Didn't AT&T use a 1.8mbps standard before the 3.6mbps? I seem to remember my speeds when my town first got 3g was around 350kbps.
Its sad to see that we can never get anything close to the mythical "7.2" mbps... but I am always happy to see AT&T is still working on things.
The new problem is will AT&T and the new iphone both support this standard together?
Seems like I could expect ~3mbps if this was all true?
I am a bit confused on how just updating some software on cell towers magically makes them faster... Aren't we already maximizing the spectrum we have? How can this update magically make things twice as fast?
And man have we come a long way from the 200kbps EDGE network we all use don the iPhone in 2007. (more like 125kbps)
Interesting 3g speed rates chart here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Downlink_Packet_Access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Downlink_Packet_Access
I hope them saying they will cover 250 million people will mean they actually try to get 3g coverage to all their customers. I'm so sick of paying $30 a month for Edge service. I live between 2 towns with a total population of around 125k, but I guess that's not enough people for us to get 3g.
I would be fine with not ever having 3g if they gave me the option to drop the iPhone data plan. Or gave me a reduced rate that reflected how slow Edge really is.
I would be fine with not ever having 3g if they gave me the option to drop the iPhone data plan. Or gave me a reduced rate that reflected how slow Edge really is.
AT&T just doesn't get it. They already beat the competition in speed, there's no need to add more at the moment.
They utterly fail in reliability. Fix the dropped calls and data issues. Then add coverage/speed increases.
They utterly fail in reliability. Fix the dropped calls and data issues. Then add coverage/speed increases.
Yea AT&T sohould be working on obtaining 4g and preparing there towers and network and everything for it they shouldn't be working on 3G speed when there's is the best already they need coverage too duh
HSPA+ is available here and it provides 10+ Mb/s (the highest I've seen is 17). As mentioned, it's all about the backhaul; all sites here have been upgraded to 200 Gb/s each. I wish you all luck; every day I see yet another thread about AT&T connectivity problems, and I'd love to see the network improve (it was painful when I was using it last year!)
I think that AT&T should end all Verizon bashing ad campaigns so that it would:
a) slow customer growth and make service better for the rest of us,
and b) give them money to actually fix their network, since clearly it's all going to advertising.
a) slow customer growth and make service better for the rest of us,
and b) give them money to actually fix their network, since clearly it's all going to advertising.
THIS!
I hate, hate, hate losing my entire signal for no damn reason, especially when I haven't even moved my phone for hours at work on my desk. I watch my phone, I have full 3G signal when I'm in iPod and as soon as I hit Safari sometimes it'll just drop completely. Annoying as hell.
This may not be too bad...
While data in my area (Chicago) has been really pretty damn good for a few months now, the voice drops persist. I absolutely agree they've dropped the ball on this and have to fix it.
Now, talking about HSPA+ specifically, this is possibly a pretty big decision for AT&T and deserves some scrutiny.
Throughout the UMTS world, operators are making the decision whether or not to go to HSPA+ and it's higher throughput speeds, or make the plunge and go with LTE. There are many operators who are going to upgrade what they have and wait out the initial phases of LTE.
There are decent reasons for doing so. LTE is a new network architecture and a new (for UMTS operators) RF technology as well. That's two new things at the same time, which the (very) conservative telecom industry frowns upon.
I could see a situation whereby AT&T decided that since their backhaul is being upgraded, to leverage that newly upgraded backhaul (this is still underway - I'm not intending to say it's anywhere near complete) and add HSPA+. It's a less risky move than going to LTE. There are rumblings that Verizon is having some growing pains with LTE, while this is to be expected to a large extent, it's also something that AT&T can sidestep for the time being. HSPA+ isn't new, it's been deployed in many places already and I suspect most of the bugs have been ironed out already.
This also means that there are a lot of existing and forthcoming mobiles that support or will be supporting HSPA+. This isn't true for LTE at the moment. Yes, everyone expects this to be fixed and for LTE mobiles to come dropping down from heaven, but it's going to be a while. Same for chipsets.
I suspect that this may well mean that Apple will be going the HSPA+ route, which - at least for the time being - opens up a significant speed gap between AT&T and Verizon. 14.4 Mbps (peak, theoretical) vs. 3.0 Mbps (peak, theoretical) is not something to sniffle at. HSPA+ does have a speed roadmap that goes up to something like 85 Mbps, so keep that in mind as well. You do have to deploy more antennas for MIMO to get to those speeds though. That's something I have a hard time believing that AT&T will do, but they could.
AT&T, fix your voice drops, get the backhaul upgrades in, deploy HSPA+ in a meaningful way (e.g., not just for press coverage), and things may indeed be decent for the next 12-18 months. Then Verizon will have LTE deployed and running well, and the battle begins all over again.
It's a short window of opportunity, but it's there.
While data in my area (Chicago) has been really pretty damn good for a few months now, the voice drops persist. I absolutely agree they've dropped the ball on this and have to fix it.
Now, talking about HSPA+ specifically, this is possibly a pretty big decision for AT&T and deserves some scrutiny.
Throughout the UMTS world, operators are making the decision whether or not to go to HSPA+ and it's higher throughput speeds, or make the plunge and go with LTE. There are many operators who are going to upgrade what they have and wait out the initial phases of LTE.
There are decent reasons for doing so. LTE is a new network architecture and a new (for UMTS operators) RF technology as well. That's two new things at the same time, which the (very) conservative telecom industry frowns upon.
I could see a situation whereby AT&T decided that since their backhaul is being upgraded, to leverage that newly upgraded backhaul (this is still underway - I'm not intending to say it's anywhere near complete) and add HSPA+. It's a less risky move than going to LTE. There are rumblings that Verizon is having some growing pains with LTE, while this is to be expected to a large extent, it's also something that AT&T can sidestep for the time being. HSPA+ isn't new, it's been deployed in many places already and I suspect most of the bugs have been ironed out already.
This also means that there are a lot of existing and forthcoming mobiles that support or will be supporting HSPA+. This isn't true for LTE at the moment. Yes, everyone expects this to be fixed and for LTE mobiles to come dropping down from heaven, but it's going to be a while. Same for chipsets.
I suspect that this may well mean that Apple will be going the HSPA+ route, which - at least for the time being - opens up a significant speed gap between AT&T and Verizon. 14.4 Mbps (peak, theoretical) vs. 3.0 Mbps (peak, theoretical) is not something to sniffle at. HSPA+ does have a speed roadmap that goes up to something like 85 Mbps, so keep that in mind as well. You do have to deploy more antennas for MIMO to get to those speeds though. That's something I have a hard time believing that AT&T will do, but they could.
AT&T, fix your voice drops, get the backhaul upgrades in, deploy HSPA+ in a meaningful way (e.g., not just for press coverage), and things may indeed be decent for the next 12-18 months. Then Verizon will have LTE deployed and running well, and the battle begins all over again.
It's a short window of opportunity, but it's there.
3G speeds are great here. Probably because I live in a metro area. There's tons of fiber uplink sites, cause I'm right between Baltimore and DC. In rural areas, there aren't that many fiber hubs, so running fiber backhauls is costly especially if the nearest fiber switching station is in a CO 20 or so miles away.