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LTE home internet?

#1

Hey all.

So my internet up here in Canada is pretty slow. 6 down 1 up. It’s the best I can get unfortunately with Telus living in a small town. Appetently though there is a new internet I can get through them that they arnt even advertising cause there still testing the waters with it so to speak. It’s LTE home internet. I guess it’s more or less a bit LTE antenna that goes off the cellphone towers in the area and broadcasts the speeds to your home. Box just uses a SIM card. They claim the speeds are between 12-90mbps depending on router location and location to towers. But they said I should get atleast 40.

Are there any downsides to internet like this? Latency issues? They claim it’s perfect and weather and number of people on the system don’t effect your speeds. Seems to good to be true since they don’t advertise it yet.

#2

I’d go through their TOS with a fine toothed comb. I know in my region of the world LTE internet usually has some form of data cap. Even if it’s not a hard cap it’s a soft cap that will nerf the connection speed once a certain, often extraordinarily low, amount of data is consumed. Or once a certain amount of data is consumed the speed will stay the same, but the price starts to skyrocket.

#3

The LTE specification provides downlink peak rates of 300 Mbit/s, uplink peak rates of 75 Mbit/s and QoS provisions permitting a transfer latency of less than 5 ms in the radio access network.

That being said, thats just what its specified to handle. How you carrier actually handles it is a different story. For them, I cannot say, as I live America. But if you are gonna go this route, your results are mostly going to be determined by how well of a connection you would have to the carriers signal towers. So if you are too far away to have a decent connection then you may be better off with your current plan actually.

weather and number of people on the system don’t effect your speeds.

Yes they do --highly-- affect speeds. What they said there is bullshit. Weather not so much as compared to people using the network. Because as always, they over provision the network to maximize profits.

How much the speeds are affected by users is determined by how the radio handles the packets them selves as the network becomes busy. There are two important kinds, TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access). You can read more about them here.

If the carriers uses the later, CDMA, then you are in luck as this will be more reliable of the two. IF they use TDMA then you will be okay until the network becomes busy or during peak hours.

EDIT (spellings).

#4

Ya I think I’ll pass. Seems fishy. My downloads are slow now but atleast I can game.