Holy Fast! Did Verizon Upgrade My LTE Tower?
allquixotic
Newbie

Hi guys,

I just recently noticed that the LTE tower closest to my house in the Baltimore-Washington suburban area has gained significant speed when downloading! Does anyone know if they have upgraded capacity and/or added towers in the vicinity of Severna Park or Glen Burnie MD?

For comparison (speeds given in kiloBYTES not BITS): During peak hours I used to get about 350 to 750 KB/s downstream on HTTP downloads. Now I get about 900 KB/s to 1 MB/s even during peak hours, and I've seen it touch 1389 KB/s! This is a new record for me; as a user of the HTC Thunderbolt since its launch date in 2011, I have never seen the LTE network serve up that much data per second. Never. LTE just broke its own speed limit, THIS WEEK, after over a YEAR of providing speeds comparable to 7 Megabit DSL.

This is great, but I want to know why. Is there some kind of incremental upgrade to LTE between "regular LTE" and "LTE Advanced"? I KNOW I'm not getting LTE Advanced because they haven't even started to deploy that anywhere. And I know I'm getting better service than I used to. So, this is either an incremental upgrade, or I'm getting a much better signal, or the tower(s) in my area are suddenly less loaded-down (although I doubt it's a load problem, because I've tried using it at 3 or 4 AM and could still never pass about 1050 KB/s in the past.) So I get an extra 300 KB/s -- I'll take it! Smiley Happy

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