I am in my house, full bars on 3G on my 3Gs. For some reason it's been running so slow but only when I am in this area.
Anyone have an idea why this could be happening?
Anyone have an idea why this could be happening?
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Full bars 3G, running slow?
- Thread starter ajohnson253
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There are all kinds of things besides signal strength which can affect 3G data speeds. Network congestion, speed of the the network connection at the tower, weather, interference, physical obstacles, etc.
It's the backhaul. Basically what connects the cell tower network to the internet. AT&T was cleverly foolish when they did their network updates all around the US. They upgraded the towers to handle the massive loads of data and voice calls. They also laid down the ground work for the HSDPA/HSUPA (7.2Mb/s and 5.4Mb/s respectively) and also a solid base for the HSPA+ network they will implement.
However, when I said cleverly foolish is that even though they upgraded the cell network, they forgot to upgrade the backhaul. So basically, we have full bars and awesome connections to the cell towers, but the cell towers have a piss poor connection and lag issues because now, all traffic bottlenecks at AT&T's backhaul system.
So even if you have great signal, the network speed will be reduced to the backhaul speed. Think of this as a Intel CPU and the Front Side Bus (FSB). No matter how fast the CPU is, it's performance will be affected by the FSB's transfer speed.
What jav6454 has so eloquently described is what I was trying to get at with "network connection at the tower."
Just to reiterate what others have said. I notice the same problems usually when I am at sporting events (Phillies and Eagles) so I chalk it up to congestion.