Re: STM always enforced?
 

I think you've misunderstoood how the categories work.

Cat 4-8 are NOT LTE Advanced. Only 6-8 are. 1-5 are all standard LTE (3GPP Rel 8). All UK networks are already Cat 4 capable and support all category devices. "Leaving out cat 3" is not a concept that exists. However, only Vodafone and EE will ever be able to exploit the full capabilities of a Cat 4 device. Cat 4 devices will work just fine on 3 and O2 but they will never achieve full speed.

LTE Advanced is fully backwards compatible and will support all previous LTE devices. A phone that does not support LTE-A does not become "useless" once the network upgrades arrive.

As with all broadband services, competition breeds progress, and just as we've seen in the LTE market VM are moving forward too. Unfortunately, one of the places I'm looking into moving to won't have FTTC for another 6 months if ever, though FTTPoD is also going to be available "soon" (it's on a FTTPoD trial exchange) so I may end up back on paltry VM service for a short period :(

Re: STM always enforced?
 

O2's 4G auction results do look bad but I believe they will be using the BT capacity as well (BT brought some 4G).

Still 4G will be a niche thing for at least a few years.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

BT will be using EE's network and O2 deny having anything to do with them.

As for niche, over a million customers in less than a year isn't that niche. Took the mobile networks nearly 15 years to get that many customers the first time round. Plus, how many customers do VM have? Chances are 4G will overtake that by the middle of next year.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

Not at all, I merely read what the operators have said, the people who are meant to know how their own industry works. As it's not my place botheration or interest to understand them it's their problem, not mine. I merely use my phone and that is all.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

People who are meant to know how the industry works said your s4 will become "useless" if they run their network at full speed? LOL.

Great move. Make nearly every current generation handset useless, including the iPhone 5s

Re: STM always enforced?
 

My condolences! FTTPoD will cheer you up after though :)

Re: STM always enforced?
 

No, but their explanation of the categorys of 4G seem to be wrong apparently.

I know my phone will work on many networks around the world but according to the box the S4 I have is only cat 3. Or maybe it's got cat 4 too (as some websites suggest) but it's not mentioned?

In any case 100 down and 50 up on a mobile is as fast as I will ever want to go.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

approx 3-4% then.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

It uses a Snapdragon 600, which is CAT3. The 800 is CAT4 and Samsung specifically hailed the Note 3 as being one of the first CAT4 phones, so I very much doubt the S4 will ever have CAT4 capabilities, unless they roll out an upgraded version (which isn't too unthinkable, they did that with the S3 I think).

Re: STM always enforced?
 

3-4% of what? It's already accounting for 40% of new sales, and that's before prices were dropped by nearly 75% over the last 6 months.

---------- Post added at 17:30 ---------- Previous post was at 17:27 ----------

The Snapdragon 800 is actually a LTE-Advanced ("true 4G") chipset and an upgraded version of the Galaxy S4 with it already exists. Originally released as Korea-only a leaked UK EE firmware for an international model has surfaced, suggesting it will be coming over here too.

---------- Post added at 17:31 ---------- Previous post was at 17:30 ----------

The S4 LTE (GT-i9505) is category 3, yes. And yes, it can readily do those speeds - both of which are faster than BT FTTC and the upload alone is ten times faster than what VM can give me even without STM :rolleyes:

Then there's the S4 3G (GT-i9500) and S4 LTE-Advanced (GT-i9506) and the S4 active, S4 mini, and so on...

Re: STM always enforced?
 

Well 100 down and 50 up will do me until the next upgrade :D

Re: STM always enforced?
 

Back on the original topic - I've just exceeded double the threshold and suffered no slowdown. I did think I'd seen STM over the weekend but it may just have been congestion as my SamKnows reports show that there is plenty of that but using multiple streams still allows downloads using a download manager or TBB speedtests to hit the headline rate.

I can't figure out what they are doing as it seems they deny any knowledge of STM being absent anywhere.

===

No I was wrong. STM has now kicked in but about 30 minutes after the downloads completed. That's quite a joke really if speeds are restricted way after the time when it actually matters.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

I thought you said that only Cat6-8 were LTE-A? The Snapdragon 800 is only CAT-4, so is there more to it than that?

This is true, but how much bandwidth is there to go around, really? DC-HSDPA+ is meant to be 42Mbit but I rarely ever see it break double digits. Not only are you dealing with the perils of a wireless technology, you're also competing with sometimes hundreds of other people. I would like to know how much capacity the various spectrum blocks can truly have.

Re: STM always enforced?
 

Cat6-8 are LTE-A only, support for them requires a device to be LTE-A. LTE-A did not remove the previous categories though so an LTE-A device does not have to be cat 6/7/8, it can also be cat 4. In this case we have a device that supports LTE-A capabilities (i.e. carrier aggregation) but not the increased speeds it brings, and only supports previously existing LTE speeds. The main benefit at the moment is to allow carrier aggregation so operators that do not have fully contiguous allocations of the maximum available spectrum to achieve standard LTE speeds by combining multiple, smaller blocks. For example 3, which has allocations of 2x15Mhz and 2x5Mhz can combine the two into a single 2x20Mhz to achieve 150Mbps with LTE-A, while with LTE (standard) they could never achieve full Cat 4 speed. It doesn't benefit anyone else really, since EE and Vodafone already have multiple contiguous blocks of maximum size, which is a very rare asset globally.


That depends on your cell size and how well you manage/optimize your network. Things change quickly - the average I get from DC-HSPA now is 11Mbps, compared to 2Mbps a year ago - though O2 still does 12Mbps without DC-HSPA in my neck of the woods. Plus, dual-cell is implemented really really badly in the UK by all networks IMO. And then there's the fact the app most people use (Speedtest.net) being next to useless for anything above 10Mbps on mobile.

For LTE(A) EE and Sodafone both have 3-4x the allocated spectrum than they had for 3G, and with LTE MIMO is basically universal thereby doubling capacity again under certain conditions. That's why EE advertise "average" speeds on LTE as around 5x that of 3G, which they conservatively put as 10-15Mbps vs. 2-3Mbps

Well then you're looking into matters of cell density and spectral efficiency, but take a typical example of a 3-sector macrosite in a city, which would deliver a max of 3x150Mbps (450Mbps) usable capacity using a single 20Mhz carrier, EE and Vodafone both have enough spectrum for three of these, putting them at a total capacity of 1350Mbps per site. Cell density can be dozens to hundreds per square mile in cities, and total 15,000+ across the UK per network. To be fair capacity will more likely be limited by the gigabit backhauls VM are putting in for these sites, if not by poor signal or interference than total spectrum capacity.

To put it in perspective, the amount spectrum each of the larger networks have dedicated to 4G is roughly equivalent to the amount VM have dedicated to "fibre broadband" - except with equal down and up spectrum. So instead of 16 down, 4 up, you've got the equivalent of something that's more like 15 down, 7.5 up on mobile (7.5 down x2-way MIMO)

---------- Post added at 22:22 ---------- Previous post was at 22:21 ----------

That does sound distinctly like congestion. I usually use a UDP speedtest to rule that out as that completely eliminates the effect of "multiple streams".

Joke? VM? Blasphemy! :rolleyes:

Re: STM always enforced?
 

of EE's 27million users ;)

most people dont buy a £500+ phone every year :)

4G will be mainstream when low end phones that cost circa £100 come with it, I guess in a gen or 2 that will be the case so either 2014 or 2015.

The barrier just isnt EE's extorniote prices but the phone prices as well.

Also the S5 is coming out earlier than scheduled since the S4 has had poor sales.