They need to expand their LTE footprint quickly, or they're going to bleed all of their high-end customers.
AT&T and Verizon are absolutely killing them right now- as nice as Sprint's "unlimited" is, it's like dial-up by comparison on their clogged 3G network and their WiMax network doesn't even seem capable of pulling above 100kbps anymore.
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A few friends who have an LTE device and we live in an Sprint LTE area and it is faster compared to AT&T H+. Since AT&T doesn't have LTE up we couldn't compare and we did a simple site load after we cleared all browser cached and data, to see who load the site faster.
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HSPA+ is still 3G, regardless of marketing ploys. You may get faster speeds, but it depends on the towers in the area. The last time I checked a phone with HSPA+, it was 4S vs my 4. It got double the speed than my 4.
Here at my office, Sprint is awful. Most days they get 20kb/s. I'm usually around 2 MB/s. Not all that great, but speed varies per city. If I were to go to LA, the network would be complete utter crap there. Every time I go there, my service is 5 bars, but data is almost useless.
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4G is not a technical term, it just means 'fourth generation', and HSPA+ IS the fourth generation of network technology for both at&t and T-Mobile....carriers needed a way to distinguish the old 2008-2009 era networks speeds from the new upgraded speeds available today,,,,so that consumers know that the network is faster and better and calling the new speeds '4G' is a good way of doing that because ordinary consumers don't know anything about cell phone networks other than the '2G, 3G, 4G' stuff and they only learned that from the advertising....so calling it '4G' is a good way to send the message 'hey, we upgraded our network'...what else are they supposed to call it? If they called it 'HSPA+' people would ask 'what the hell is that?'
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T-Mobile made a wonderful marketing ploy and I am especially proud of AT&T for simply quietly changing its marketing campaign to take advantage of T-Mobile's BOLD move. *Shrug* Call it 4G. Fine. Now we are forced to endure the term 4G LTE as a result. Why not 4.5G instead? Since the 'G's are no longer an indication of a wireless standard of any kind I am holding my breath until Verizon decides to brand something 10G.
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"Why not 4.5G instead?"
The same reason you don't call HSPA+ '3.5G'...because it's not easy for people to remember....
The G's were never really an indication of any kind of standard, 2G, 3G, 4G etc they are not really terms with a clear, defined meaning...they are really just marketing terms....a way of saying 'our network is better now than it used to be'...
There was an attempt to CREATE a standard for 4G, but that effort went nowhere and was ignored by pretty much every one....so they wisely dropped it...because after all a standard which is ignored and followed by no one is not really a standard, is it?
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ZpikeOct 17, 2012, 5:15 PM
You're wrong on this one. The G's have always meant something and the standards preceded the lying network carriers. The actual truth is that true 4G gets 100 Mb/s down. None of the carriers get that and hence none of them have a 4G network. When Sprint rolled out its Wimax network, they tried to justify the lie because this was a fourth generation of a network for them. Verizon picked up the same lie when they built out their LTE network, but theirs was at least slightly better because theoretically LTE advanced can get to 100 Mb/s. So, whenever they upgrade their current network they might eventually be 4G. At best its a 4G upgradable network. T-mobile had absolutely no footing to stand on. HSPA+ is merely an upgrade and neither constitut...
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T Bone said:
4G is not a technical term, it just means 'fourth generation', and HSPA+ IS the fourth generation of network technology for both at&t and T-Mobile....carriers needed a way to distinguish the old 2008-2009 era networks speeds from the new upgraded speeds available today,,,,so that consumers know that the network is faster and better and calling the new speeds '4G' is a good way of doing that because ordinary consumers don't know anything about cell phone networks other than the '2G, 3G, 4G' stuff and they only learned that from the advertising....so calling it '4G' is a good way to send the message 'hey, we upgraded our network'...what else are they supposed to call it? If they called it 'HSPA+' people would a
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2G, 3G, 4G etc are just marketing terms when you get right down to it...there's never been a clear definition of '3G' or an independent body that certified what was and was not '3G'....which is why you get such radically different results on allegedly '3G' networks....with some 3G networks being faster than others by an order of magnitude....
The bottom line is, the only way we ever had to know what was, and was not '3G" was the fact that the carrier put the little '3G' alpha tag on our phones....
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Speedtest.net shows me pulling 20mbps+ consistently in the NYC area on AT&T LTE (which is incredible), and i've hit as high as 35mbps (which is mind blowing.)
Best of all, LTE seems to penetrate buildings much better.
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The reason LTE penetrates buildings better is because AT&T and Verizon are both using the 700 Mhz spectrum to deploy LTE. The 700 Mhz spectrum is the best building peneration spectrum being used in the US and another benefit of the 700 spectrum is it can go farther than other spectrum being used. This is why it is call the beach front property of spectrum.
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