Around 5 - 8 Mbps down during the day (10MHz of bandwidth), but I only have a 4G phone. Based on what I’ve seen, 5G should be getting me at least 100Mbps in 3.6GHz band no matter the carrier (100Mhz and 90Mhz of bandwidth).
At night, I get 40Mbps, which is even enough for 4k60fps VP9 on YouTube. But most of this was upload, which is a stable 20Mbps all day. I guess most people don’t upload all that much.
Theoretically, I can get 300GB, then unlimited 3Mbps at Telekom for €20.50 (limited by age), where I was able to pull 150Mbps in LTE-A (2600MHz 20+20MHz), and typically has some 35Mbps even during the day in places not covered by LTE-A, but I am too lazy to read and consider the ToS and Privacy policy.
If you’re wondering how I was able to test that, I bought a regular prepaid SIM in Czech Republic and tested this through roaming. No ID card and face scans needed there.
From experience, using a mobile data plan as your exclusive internet provider sucks. Give up any ideas of online gaming or a consistent connection under peak hours.
Not necessarily. ISPs are now widely offering 4G or 5G home internet. Of course, doesn’t beat fiber, but 5G SA can have both low latency and high speeds.
Oh, and if we were talking about mmWave… the real world speed tests I’ve seen from US reach around 3Gbps. Yeah, faster than most fiber. Although, if talking about phones, that’s basically outdoors only, or wherever the BTS is.
Right, I should also mention those home thingys typically have outdoor mounted antennas.
And also, it helps if you can manually select network bands. For example, when I was trying O2 with 20Mbps capped unlimited, I was only getting 3Mbps during the day. Based on NetMonster, indoors it switched me to 800MHz band, which was probably largely overloaded. Manually switching to 1800MHz then gave me the full 20Mbps.
Let me give you an example, I’ll take a test right now. Pay attention to 1800 and 2100 in top left of my notification panel, that represents the network band. In this case, both have 10MHz of bandwidth, but the load is likely far different (at around 3AM they’re quite identical).
As you can see, with all bands enabled (default), I end up in 1800MHz:
And that gives me…
Turd speed. Tested with same server, here comes manually selected Band 1:
Upload took a hit, but download gained.
From experience, only Orange does the automatic selection well in here, where it won’t prefer signal quality over bandwidth. This does reduce the battery life a bit, but it’s worth it in my opinion.
To be fair, I gotta mention the 2100MHz (and 900) is only provided for coverage extension by another carrier, thus the clearly lower priority, but it’s the same even with O2 and Telekom where this is not the case, and they prefer overloaded 800MHz indoors.
Last fun fact: When I had a phone that couldn’t do this, I used to force it into another band by putting it into a turned off microwave to force reconnection until desired results, and then keep it connected by running 24/7 pings in Termux.
What are your speeds like? I see unlimited mobile data plans available for about half the price I’m paying for my 100Mbit fibre. Hmm…
Around 5 - 8 Mbps down during the day (10MHz of bandwidth), but I only have a 4G phone. Based on what I’ve seen, 5G should be getting me at least 100Mbps in 3.6GHz band no matter the carrier (100Mhz and 90Mhz of bandwidth).
At night, I get 40Mbps, which is even enough for 4k60fps VP9 on YouTube. But most of this was upload, which is a stable 20Mbps all day. I guess most people don’t upload all that much.
Theoretically, I can get 300GB, then unlimited 3Mbps at Telekom for €20.50 (limited by age), where I was able to pull 150Mbps in LTE-A (2600MHz 20+20MHz), and typically has some 35Mbps even during the day in places not covered by LTE-A, but I am too lazy to read and consider the ToS and Privacy policy.
If you’re wondering how I was able to test that, I bought a regular prepaid SIM in Czech Republic and tested this through roaming. No ID card and face scans needed there.
From experience, using a mobile data plan as your exclusive internet provider sucks. Give up any ideas of online gaming or a consistent connection under peak hours.
Not necessarily. ISPs are now widely offering 4G or 5G home internet. Of course, doesn’t beat fiber, but 5G SA can have both low latency and high speeds.
Oh, and if we were talking about mmWave… the real world speed tests I’ve seen from US reach around 3Gbps. Yeah, faster than most fiber. Although, if talking about phones, that’s basically outdoors only, or wherever the BTS is.
Right, I should also mention those home thingys typically have outdoor mounted antennas.
And also, it helps if you can manually select network bands. For example, when I was trying O2 with 20Mbps capped unlimited, I was only getting 3Mbps during the day. Based on NetMonster, indoors it switched me to 800MHz band, which was probably largely overloaded. Manually switching to 1800MHz then gave me the full 20Mbps.
Let me give you an example, I’ll take a test right now. Pay attention to 1800 and 2100 in top left of my notification panel, that represents the network band. In this case, both have 10MHz of bandwidth, but the load is likely far different (at around 3AM they’re quite identical).
As you can see, with all bands enabled (default), I end up in 1800MHz:
And that gives me…
Turd speed. Tested with same server, here comes manually selected Band 1:
Upload took a hit, but download gained.
From experience, only Orange does the automatic selection well in here, where it won’t prefer signal quality over bandwidth. This does reduce the battery life a bit, but it’s worth it in my opinion.
To be fair, I gotta mention the 2100MHz (and 900) is only provided for coverage extension by another carrier, thus the clearly lower priority, but it’s the same even with O2 and Telekom where this is not the case, and they prefer overloaded 800MHz indoors.
Last fun fact: When I had a phone that couldn’t do this, I used to force it into another band by putting it into a turned off microwave to force reconnection until desired results, and then keep it connected by running 24/7 pings in Termux.