Oh, that's interesting! (Off-Topic)

by red robber , Crawfish Country, Thursday, July 16, 2015, 08:06 (3421 days ago) @ Funkmon

While I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia, I usually find that for advanced electronics and communications topics, its a decent resource for just ballparking specs and getting an understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)

Its been almost 10 years since I finished my degree program in this general area, but I still get the basics. From what I've read on different sites, 4G LTE can run anywhere from 50 to 300Mbps. And while towers can have bandwidths from 1.4Ghz to 20Ghz, if the tower/carrier is using a form of CDMA (code division multiple access), you should have a 5Ghz bw and 200 user capacity.

Smaller than what I expected in terms of users and data capacity per tower. You may be using a significant chunk of the capacity in the evenings. But every cell tower is custom to the needs of the area. Urban areas will have more towers covering smaller areas to accomodate the larger population density. I would assume that since you are in the Detroit area, there are many different towers that you may be able to ping to/from as the data load changes. This may be the cause of some of your lag like issues sometimes, because the network may move you around to keep you connected while also providing you and the other customers continued access.