WebFire;1263709 wrote:More from my rep. She's not the BS feeding type. She is sending me some Powerpoints to further her point.
Hmmm, I've routinely hit speeds over 20mbs. That's every bit as fast as many home broadband options. Streaming HD Netflix requires a consistent 9mbs or so. More is, quite honestly, overkill. The software/phones are still not really capable of taking advantage of the speed (even on wifi, my laptop is faster than my phone...maybe that is conversion to mobile though).
And I think her statement about bandwidth and capacity is BS. The real capacity constraint is spectrum. You can always add more capacity with additional towers (and there's some really interesting tech out there coming).
I'm not sure if AT&T is second-gen LTE, so her claims about speed could be correct. But she seems to be confusing bandwidth with throughput (if that's the right term). Bandwidth is a function of # of towers and spectrum. You can service more users by servicing them faster, but throttling happens because more bandwidth is demanded than available. It doesn't matter how fast the connection, if the spectrum is only 1mbs (for example) then you're capped at that rate. Higher capability in throughput, in her example, is more about how efficiently they utilize a fixed bandwidth.
And I'm pretty sure VZW has a boatload more 4G spectrum than AT&T. AT&T is trying to play catch-up, but VZW can still serve as many, if not more, users at slower speeds if they have more spectrum.
