4G LTE Performance

There is a lot of misinformation floating around about LTE performance.  Obviously, when there is this misinformation, and proper project management practices are not followed, wrong decisions can be made.

Regarding 4G LTE performance:  I can sit in my mountainous neighborhood at some geographic points and get over 16Gbps down and 8 Gbps up. 41.34 Gbps down and 16.78 Gbps up (found a new spot) I am not even "under" a tower.  (I actually haven't gone out of my way to find a best place for the cell phone signal.)  I go to another point and can't get any cell service at all.  I switch providers, and I can't get over 8Gbps anywhere.  You've all experienced this variability when moving around.  The technology used to transmit is not the best (see the next paragraph).  That is the current nature of being in the US and being in a hilly area.

But that is not the fault of the technology.  Read this article:  U.S. drops to 55th in 4G LTE speeds.  In that article, New Zealand has an average download rate of 36 Mbps and South Korea has an average download rate of 29 Mbps.  Both have "hilly" geographies.   It is true that there are "shadows" in the grid that provide less speed.  But this is the average.

This is the most important thing to get from this blog entry:  If you are looking for a internet solution that provides speed, then you are talking about fixed antennas transacting with fixed receivers.  You are not driving.  So speed can be maximized and the antennas designed for the traffic they will receive.  There is a lot of technical detail around 4G LTE that is difficult to communicate, but the one technical detail you should understand is that in order for 4G LTE to keep to its upper speed, it needs to lock in to your receiver and the supplier needs to know the signal traffic.  If you are moving, then the antenna software has to be recalculating and resending signals and the area controller that talks to many antennas has to be involved in passing your signal off to another transmitter.   Only the designer knows what the assumptions were for traffic.

What do you do if you, eg the US, have old or poor technology?  Well, you are at the mercy of the communication companies, who want to get the most they can out of their existing investments.  Plus, community decision-makers only know what they have experienced. With cable you, uh, well, it depends on what is in the ground, but you have a basic hardware limit.  If copper wire is in the ground, you will have to dig it up (optional) and replace it with something faster.  If you have coax and want to improve from there, you will have to dig it up (optional) and replace it with fiber.  And all the in- ground oriented techniques have a distance related speed limitation.  (So does cellular wireless, but the solution isn't as costly, at least in a community environment!)

Something that might be obvious but needs to be stated:  With cellular wireless,  if you start from scratch for a community, you can use the latest technology.  You aren't bound to the 'average.' 

The key upgrade feature of cellular wireless is that perhaps the antenna needs changing, an antenna added for a different wave length set, or a receiver updated.  In many cases, at least within specification timeframes, like 4G LTE (and its faster follow-ons), software changes and an additional antenna are all that are needed. (Most, if not all, current transaction boxes are built for later upgrade.)  This is not the tower, this is the dipole or array that actually sends and receives signals.  Worse case, you add a new transaction box to the site.

In addition, as we have experienced, cellular wireless can be improved incrementally in ways other than improving the technology, such as adding another station.  This station does not have to be the tower we see, or not in a city landscape.   This can be a small device on the side of a building or on an existing structure, even a tree.

Cellular wireless technology lends itself to an incremental build out and improvement strategy.

So, those of you who are interested in improving your internet speed for your home, consider a cell wireless solution.  With the recent announcements by some providers of unlimited data, and with other providers providing a data only option, where you buy a data plan for your home and the cell phone can be separate, you might find this an very affordable replacement for your land phone, internet, and (streaming) TV needs.

For builders and developers, it is much less expensive to provide small cell wireless that has excellent internet performance than it is to ground-wire a development.