Verizon recently announced its LTE network launch along with pricing and restrictions, and some journalists were quick to put it to the test. For the most part, results have been impressive. Download speeds are much faster, on average, than what both Sprint and T-Mobile are able to deliver on their respective “4G” networks. Wilson Rothman of MSNBC was even able to beat his home cable broadband connection in terms of raw download speeds. He does note, however, that as the network begins to see more users, speed will drop a bit.
In addition to some speed limitations, there are also data usage limitations on the upcoming plans as well. As usual, there will be a 5GB data cap to prevent users from really straining the network and attempting to replace their home broadband connections with Verizon’s LTE network. But with blazing fast speeds, just how long would it take you to eat up those 5GB of data?
According to PC Mag, at full speed, roughly 30 minutes. It’s impressive and a little worrisome, but you would have to be running a number of data hogging applications – like streaming uncompressed video and torrenting – in order to gobble up all that data. Still, it’s a pretty clear indicator that there will be a little bit of bad to take with the good.
PC Mag reports:
My tests maxed out at an impressive 21Mbps. If you were downloading 5GB at that speed, it would only take you 32 minutes. Since the LTE network currently has almost nobody on it, I got average speeds around 15Mbps; Verizon estimates you’ll be able to get around 8.5Mbps with a loaded network. But very few applications actually use those speeds consistently, so I also checked out some more common uses.
You can see more of the results over at the link below, but how many of you are actually concerned with these data caps?
When I tried to max out my data usage on my iPhone, which gets anywhere between 1.5Mbps – 4Mbps depending on my location, the best I could get was about 3.2GB of data usage in a single month. I was listening to Slacker Radio and watching Netflix on the iPhone 4 with some regularity in addition to e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and Beejive IM. And I was really trying to hoard data.
Until we see apps that really eat up data, a 5GB cap is really nothing to worry about when it comes to smartphones. However, if you’re using an LTE modem for your laptop, that’s where things might get a little tricky. It’s entirely possible to use up your allotted data within a single month, and possibly exceed it, if you’re streaming video or audio and downloading or transferring files.
Only time will tell if these limitations begin to cause problems for users, but for now, I think we’ll be OK.
[Via: PC Mag]