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

by Funkmon , Thursday, July 16, 2015, 08:19 (3424 days ago) @ red robber

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.

This fits. We have 3 towers I can connect to. One visible from my house, one a mile down the road by my parents, and one near to ProbablyLast. I am infrequently switched to EV-DO rev A on the close tower, and sometimes switched to the tower by my parents' house, though only on LTE. The low number of users is a bit weird though. We've got around 2000 people per square mile of land in this area, and each cell around here appears to have a half mile to mile radius from what I remember looking at a map. Even if Sprint is only serving 10% of local customers, there's almost no safety factor there.

What does the 5GHz bandwidth mean? And I assume it does do CDMA as well.