81–90 of 339 posts
I don't know if it is the product change or the 5G, but it is really frustrating.
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Android 13 has eBPF-based network throttling options in the developer options, which will give you a similar 128kbps experience without sacrificing battery life. This applies on all interfaces, including WLAN, with the affordance of being able to switch back without dropping flows. I wouldn't recommend it for WLAN from a total system capacity perspective, as throttling eats up air-time.
The point is I have no self control. If I could manually switch it I can't be trusted.
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I wonder if 4G is better now that people who are really enthusiastic about bandwidth usage have moved up to 5G.
For most operators, spectrum is dynamically shared between LTE and 5G, so probably no.
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> They still have scars from their failure to capture the value of smartphone applications in the LTE era. That's makes a lot of sense and truly, fuck telcos.
Having worked with telcos in multiple countries, I can assure you, we cannot have a lot of nice things because of them.
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There are services that offer bonding like speedify but I don't think iPhone is supported for bonding multiple cellular connections. Not sure if Android phones do. Maybe someone has experience with it?
The iPhone isn't using bleeding edge 5G and doesn't let you lock to 5G Standalone, from what I have seen on Android using 5G Standalone (which nixes bonding with LTE) gets rid of most of the jitter that causes data connection lag. The IMS core that powers calling and texting on most cellular networks has not been upgraded to route calls and texts over 5G Standalone yet (or if so, it doesn't seem to work with the Pixe…
This is not true. T-Mobile has been allowing voNR calls on their network for over 2 years now on SA. It's up to to the handset to have it configured in modem firmware (it is configurable on Qualcomm chipsets through EFS). AT&T appears to be allowing voNR calls since around August of last year.
As for the 5G NSA substandard experience, most phones on the market don't support SA carrier aggregation. Without that the experience sucks, This is a hardware feature you'd need a flagship phone built within past 2 years to support (new ones do 3CA, older ones do 2CA). Better to leave on NSA for these phones or stay on LTE until more spectrum refarmed to NR.
Are you using T-mobile or another provider that uses them? My 5G connection is trash, but I just switched up Google Fi, which is using T-Mobile's network. Inside my apartment pictures on websites are loading like it's the early 2000's again. I'm in a major city, I thought that would help.
I'm on Visible, which is a Verizon MVNO.
My first question is whether you're on one of the new plans or one of the old plans. This is actually important because the old plans are provisioned differently. The old plans use Visible's cloud APN while the new plans run off Verizon's. A lot of people have complained that Visible's was pretty terrible. The old plans were $25/mo if you had Party Pay. The new plans start at $30, but don't require any hoops.
After that, I'd note that if you're not on the Visible+ plan, you are going to be on a lower QCI (Quality of Service Class Identifier) than most of the traffic on the network. So if others are using the network, you might experience slowness, lags, and hangs. Verizon's network isn't in the best capacity position in a lot of areas so this can be meaningful.
Verizon's low-band 5G is also not great since it uses dynamic spectrum sharing rather than having dedicated 5G spectrum.
If you're on one of the old Visible plans, I'd pay the extra $5 and get on one of the new plans. You'll need a new SIM card for it, but it's probably worth it to get off the cloud core that has generated a lot of complaints. If you're on the new $30 plan, it might be worth trying the $45 plan for a month and seeing if you get better results with the 50GB of premium data. After that, you should probably try T-Mobile or AT&T.
You can try AT&T for free using their 14-day free trial on Cricket (https://www.cricketwireless.com/free-trial.html, note that it's only 3GB of data) and you can test out T-Mobile for a whole 3 months if you have an eSIM device (https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/free-trial). If you can, it's definitely worth trying an alternative carrier since they're now offering free trials (Verizon also offers one for 30 days: https://www.verizon.com/support/verizon-test-drive-faqs/).
EDIT: as an aside, it's probably not that "higher frequencies used for 5G don't go as far or penetrate as effectively" simply because, unless you're on Visible+, you don't have access to any of those higher frequencies. Legacy Visible plans and the current $30 Visible plan only have access to low-band 5G using the same frequencies as LTE.
Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated. - Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky. - Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end…
* Self driving cars? No.
* Internet of Things? No.
* Metaverse? No.
* Remote surgical operations? You gotta be kidding.
Everyone in a big stadium can watch the show on their phones, though. If someone was willing to pay for the hundreds of tiny cell sites required.