iPad Celluar 4G LTE - How Fast?

[cheez]

Can you watch youtube in HD with your cellular 4G data plan?
How does it compare to say Comcast cable at home that's got 20mbps downstream. What is it for the cellular 4? Like on iPad 3 and iPad Mini..

Anyone?

Thanks a swimming pool...

Cheez

 

[jpiniero]

LTE might even be faster than Comcast. I don't know if I'd want to watch Youtube in HD though; you could blow through the cap.

 

[bearxor]

I've clocked a Verizon iPad 3 @ 50Mbps in the right spot. My AT&T iPhone 5 seems to top out at 30Mbps. Either is more than sufficient.

I stream videos from my house with AirVideo over cellular at 3Mbps and they look just great.

 

[cheez]

50mbps??!!#$@ 😱

That's fast. I thought it was going to be much slower than cable. Cellular has come a long way...

Thanks a foot court,


Cheez

 

[Childs]

LTE on my iPhone 5 is faster than my Comcast home internet. I can get 26Mbps down, 8Mbps up regularly. My highest upload speed has been 22Mbps, and 16Mbps or so is not uncommon. Whats lame is I dont use that bandwidth for anything other than email, maps, and the basic web search comparing prices when I'm shopping.

I havent really tested since I got my phone, but a friend who has the same phone has gotten around 45Mbps down.

 

[sour07]

Im getting 30mbps down and 15-20mbps up from AT&T on my ipad mini.

The upload is kind of insane, comcast only gives me 6mbps upload at my house.

 

[cheez]

Wow that's amazing guys. I didn't realize that LTE is that fast. And the upload is so retarded fast, CRAZY. Looks like I'll be getting a iPad Mini Cellular Verizon in a few months!

P.s. when I was with the AT&T DSL internet I was getting 512 kbps upstream, LOL.

cheez,

 

[Eug]

More important is the latency for a lot of stuff. LTE is damn fast, but the latency doesn't compare to DSL or cable.

Plus of course, there's the signal stability. I'm on 25/7 VDSL2, and coupled with WiFi, that's definitely a lot more stable than LTE on my Android phone (which also gets over 50 Mbps down in some spots).

 

[Childs]

Wow that's amazing guys. I didn't realize that LTE is that fast. And the upload is so retarded fast, CRAZY. Looks like I'll be getting a iPad Mini Cellular Verizon in a few months!

P.s. when I was with the AT&T DSL internet I was getting 512 kbps upstream, LOL.

cheez,

One thing to remember is there is no unlimited data plan. I wouldnt watch lots of videos on LTE, as you will hit your cap.

 

[dawks]

One of the things is, either iOS or even the new Youtube app itself is automatically stepping down video quality (higher compression) when on cellular (in an attempt to save uneducated users huge bandwidth bills). You'll notice a difference in video quality when connected to Wifi. Its automatic (afaik), I can't find any settings for it.

I think its an iOS thing, because I recall it happening in other apps as well. It did this for me on an iPad 4 with ATT LTE.

 

[Aikouka]

More important is the latency for a lot of stuff. LTE is damn fast, but the latency doesn't compare to DSL or cable.

It does for me. Here are my results after just running Speed Test on 3-4 bars of Verizon LTE, and using a (few weeks old) test of my Comcast-based Internet connection.

                PING        DL          UL
COMCAST CABLE   31ms      31.54Mb/s    4.77Mb/s
VERIZON LTE     47ms      20.56Mb/s    5.78Mb/s

EDIT:

One thing to remember is there is no unlimited data plan. I wouldnt watch lots of videos on LTE, as you will hit your cap.

Yeah, that causes a lot of problems for me. If I attempt to stream just about anything for a modest period of time (an hour and a half to two hours), I will hit my FOUR GIGABYTE cap. I've calculated the data usage of certain apps such as IGN's viewer, Netflix, etc, but unfortunately, I can't remember the results. I do recall that Netflix used twice as much data as Splashtop and IGN used three times as much.

 

[Eug]

What are you pinging? With Speedtest.net, my local cable provider has way, way lower pings (at least if it's not congested). Same with DSL. My LTE pings are similar to yours though.

 

[Aikouka]

What are you pinging? With Speedtest.net, my local cable provider has way, way lower pings (at least if it's not congested). Same with DSL. My LTE pings are similar to yours though.

That's running Speed Test on the same test server (between cellular and wired Internet), which is also hosted by Comcast.

 

[bearxor]

It does for me. Here are my results after just running Speed Test on 3-4 bars of Verizon LTE, and using a (few weeks old) test of my Comcast-based Internet connection.

                PING        DL          UL
COMCAST CABLE   31ms      31.54Mb/s    4.77Mb/s
VERIZON LTE     47ms      20.56Mb/s    5.78Mb/s

Yeah, it's probably not terrible latency compared to cable. I have a fiber connection and my ping times to test sites are typically < 10ms though.

Yeah, that causes a lot of problems for me. If I attempt to stream just about anything for a modest period of time (an hour and a half to two hours), I will hit my FOUR GIGABYTE cap. I've calculated the data usage of certain apps such as IGN's viewer, Netflix, etc, but unfortunately, I can't remember the results. I do recall that Netflix used twice as much data as Splashtop and IGN used three times as much.

I don't know what you're doing here though. Just in the past two days I streamed 8 episodes of Entourage off HBO all on cellular between my iPad and iPhone. That's 4 hours of video, pretty nice quality, and I've only used 2GB of my shared data plan, and that includes my regular usage and my wife's line is included in that total. Though she's only used some 50MB of data almost 10 days in to the cycle.

I should add that I also have regularly streamed stuff off Netflix as well. It just depends on what I'm watching. I watched most of parks and rec off cellular on netflix about two months ago and never came close to my 10GB plan. I typically use 5-6GB a month.

 

[Eug]

Hmmm... Strange. I get ping times under 15 ms on VDSL2 (TekSavvy/Bell), and I'm told my cable brethren in the area (Rogers) are the same. I wonder why Comcast cable is so much higher.

EDIT:

If I use pingtest.net I also sometimes get 30+ ms. I guess it depends on the server.

 

[RichieZ]

It's quite fast, I used it to tether for over a month until I got my regular internet hooked up. You can easily go through data when you're on LTE.


verizon iphone 5 LTE:

home internet:

 

[Aikouka]

I don't know what you're doing here though. Just in the past two days I streamed 8 episodes of Entourage off HBO all on cellular between my iPad and iPhone. That's 4 hours of video, pretty nice quality, and I've only used 2GB of my shared data plan, and that includes my regular usage and my wife's line is included in that total. Though she's only used some 50MB of data almost 10 days in to the cycle.

I should add that I also have regularly streamed stuff off Netflix as well. It just depends on what I'm watching. I watched most of parks and rec off cellular on netflix about two months ago and never came close to my 10GB plan. I typically use 5-6GB a month.

I'm not too sure what's going on with it either. My testing isn't terribly full-proof as it just involved playing a video and checking my data usage on the phone. I also saw ridiculous amounts of data usage when just sitting there on the Netflix app's main window. Well, to be fair, ridiculous amounts for just sitting there looking at still images. I think having it open for maybe 5 seconds would result in 2MB+ of data usage, which is absurd for that.

I used to have a 2GB data plan, which should be enough given that I should rarely ever go over 1GB. However, I recall listening to the Anandtech podcast last October, and I ended up blowing through over 1GB of data on a 100MB podcast. 😱

 

[cheez]

Thanks for the reminder regards to hitting the cap. 2 or 3 GB downstream a month is not much at all. That's a lot of restrictions there. :ninja: Doesn't the iPad / mini web browser have cache enabled by default? Any sites you visited previously and the images / gif's / videos you reviewed previously should be cached right?

Yes I want the stability. I guess you can't expect too much via wireless.. I know Comcast cable is rock solid.

Wow, man, looks like streaming movies from Netflix is a no-no for me then.😳

And you don't have option to select HD resolutions when playing youtube video? I want to be able to have option to choose.


cheez

 

[Red Storm]

Pretty sure you can choose it if you want, though not 100% sure on that. You can in Android.

 

[kY]

I wanna know how fast you use up your iPad data plan on LTE.

 

[Red Storm]

I wanna know how fast you use up your iPad data plan on LTE.

Not sure how accurate this is, but here's one article:

http://www.padgadget.com/2012/09/13...e-ipad-how-much-bandwidth-does-it-really-use/

Video watching on Netflix averaged about 335 MB per hour, while listening to music on Pandora used up approximately 54MB an hour.

At that rate, I could watch about nine hours of video on my iPad or listen to 56 hours of streaming music before eating through my allotted 3GB of data per month. As a heavy video watcher, that’s not a lot of content for the price, and at 56 hours of music per month, I can only listen to less than two hours of music on a daily basis.

If you listen to music and watch videos, expect to cut those numbers in half.

 

[Aikouka]

I decided to see what sort of bandwidth I used, and after playing episode 1 of The Chappelle Show on Netflix for 1 minute, I uploaded 201KB and downloaded 10.4MB. Extrapolating that out, I will end up seeing nearly twice the bandwidth usage mentioned above.

The issue may be that my quality settings are set to the highest possible, which is resulting in a higher bitrate and/or resolution. That makes sense since I usually use Netflix at home, and I don't really care about the bandwidth usage on my Cable connection. I wish you could adjust the settings on the mobile client or have separate settings for the mobile client. I don't need terribly good quality on a 4" screen. 😛