Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

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The main reason the numbers are really meaningless is because if you want to test the speeds of just the LTE part it is impossible unless you have access to the carrier's test servers ahead of their hand off to the internet. Otherwise you are just testing the speed of the internet which we all understand varies under a number of factors.

It is good that they have a way of measuring coverage that is not strictly geographically based but since it is proprietary it is hard to actually know what it means.

Lte speeds are faster than Wifi due to the backhaul obviously, typically wireless carriers buy higher BW backhaul that wifi providers since wifi is free so they tend to skimp on that, in theory wifi can do about the same speeds as Lte from the air interface capability by itself.

I work for OpenSignal, and produced the data used in this report, so I'd like give some assurances around the coverage aspect. The principle is to calculate the percentage of time that each user was connected to LTE over the period in question, and then average over such users to arrive at an average figure per network. Naturally I'm understating some complexities around minor issues (mainly around cleaning and combining users' measurements), but it isn't like we've gone completely off-road and developed a black-box procedure here - it's pretty much what you would expect.

On the first point, yes, you're completely right that we are measuring the whole package, however we'd argue that this is what users really care about.

Thanks for responding. It sounds like a pretty reliable approach, but it almost sounds more like availability than coverage in the traditional sense that we think about it (geographic, which has some drawbacks as well).

And I agree, the end to end is where the rubber meets the road but I think with the state of LTE, particularly where Advanced features like CA come in to play, we are at times being throttled by the internet more than by the air interface. Although, we are a long way from having that type of tput across the air interface everywhere, but it seems like LTE has the potential to start outstripping what the current internet can do.

Observed performance isn't meaningless. Most users care about access to the internet, not what the spectrum and tech can academically obtain.

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