October 25th, 2018 at 2:59 AM
Cable providers seem much less affected than cell service providers these days. There is a lot of proof from independent studies that has shown that various websites (including YouTube, NetFlix, and Amazon streaming services, among a few other similar services) have their data throttled pretty significantly. T-Mobile (my provider) is pretty open about it. It seems to be more of a network management system for handling fundamentally high-bandwidth streaming services than it is anything else.
LTE towers can actually only handle about 0.5 gbps/sector in many cases, and one sector may cover a few thousand people or more. Although obviously the vast majority of these people are not using data in any significant amount at any given point in time, if you had even a dozen people streaming netflix at full-quality (say, 10mbps), it would probably put enough strain on the tower to cause a noticeable drop in speeds for everyone else...
Until 5G comes around, I think things will probably stay that way. Hopefully cable doesn't feel justified to jump on that bandwagon. They definitely have significantly higher bandwidth than a cell tower does.
(Also, I think T-Mobile pretty much blows the competition out of the water in terms of their speeds, at least in many areas. I get 60-70mbps pretty regularly. AT&T and Sprint couldn't even get close.
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LTE towers can actually only handle about 0.5 gbps/sector in many cases, and one sector may cover a few thousand people or more. Although obviously the vast majority of these people are not using data in any significant amount at any given point in time, if you had even a dozen people streaming netflix at full-quality (say, 10mbps), it would probably put enough strain on the tower to cause a noticeable drop in speeds for everyone else...
Until 5G comes around, I think things will probably stay that way. Hopefully cable doesn't feel justified to jump on that bandwagon. They definitely have significantly higher bandwidth than a cell tower does.
(Also, I think T-Mobile pretty much blows the competition out of the water in terms of their speeds, at least in many areas. I get 60-70mbps pretty regularly. AT&T and Sprint couldn't even get close.
)
