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Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

Is that really a logical assumption?

Could it just be that they have more customers and they haven't upgraded infrastructure to keep up with demand?

Are you positing it could be "we added (X*Y) number of subscribers this quarter, and for every Y subscribers we need to add 1 tower, but we only added (less than X) towers"? Reportedly, Verizon has some of the slowest[1] subscriber growth among the smartphone carriers, so that doesn't pass the smell test unless Verizon simply decided that hoarding money was higher priority than providing the good customer experience that drives growth.

For months (years?) there have been swirlings that Verizon can't handle "unlimited", accusations they've denied[2], OpenSignal's conclusion seems the most likely.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/even-sprint-topped-at-t-verizon-in... [2] http://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/verizon-execs-dismiss...

I'd posit it's an increase in per-sub utilization vs total sub count. Users aren't motivated to limit their LTE usage with these plans, and in some cases eschew Wi-Fi entirely.

I thought Verizon and AT&T market share is shrinking if T-Mobile is gaining ground as the total number of customers is fairly steady. AKA annual growth is going to be under 2% and the bandwidth drop is significantly larger than that.

Unlikely in most areas. You really cannot make that judgement anymore as the carriers have added speed tiering.

What does "upgraded infrastructure" mean in this context? Most cell carriers use a shared infrastructure IIRC.

This isn't exactly true (EDIT: Although I suppose its an accurate statement if you're talking about MVNOs [+] riding on top of a carrier's infrastructure).

Yes, they share the tower. Yes, tower position (higher is better) is dictated by agreements and dollars spent. Yes, on rare occasions backhaul is shared (remote cells via microwave). But that's where it ends. Each carrier's RF and networking gear is dedicated, and usually their backhauls are copper or fiber dedicated to themselves.

The problem is people want to treat mobile data like it's not a shared RF medium with 1Gbps backhaul to each tower. This is not how it works. If you think it's hard to get fiber to your home, consider trying to get fiber to every cell site. These problems take years to solve, with construction crews trenching or using a ditch witch to run new physical cable to each tower from nearby termination nodes.

[+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...

Getting fiber to every cell site sounds orders of magnitude easier than getting fiber to every house.

Infrastructure is hard, just ask Google Fiber.

I'd never call either one easy. But running fiber to one cell tower sounds a lot easier than running fiber to each of the thousand buildings that tower would cover.

Yes, but you're still constrained by the RF that cell site covers. 1Gb cell tower backhaul? (and only 1Gb to cover all of those buildings) Or 1Gb to each building? Tradeoffs.

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