Real world speeds from T-Mo's 42Mbps network

[sciwizam]

Looks like Brian Klug is testing out the SGS2 from TMobile. Damn! 😱

Here are couple other shots with higher speeds and lower latencies: https://twitter.com/#!/nerdtalker/status/122746347999858688 , https://twitter.com/#!/nerdtalker/status/122745325210439680

https://twitter.com/#!/nerdtalker/status/122758961815494656

 

[Bateluer]

Nice download, kinda poor upload though.

 

[Fire&Blood]

Would like to ask T-Mobile if these numbers were worth sacrificing the Exynos.

2 TMO executives convo: "Yeah, let's deprive all of our customers of Exynos because it's "limited" to 21Mbps and let's get a 42Mbps chipset so that very select few can get 15 Mbps on an inferior SoC"-"Wow, that's brilliant"

 

[Bateluer]

Would like to ask T-Mobile if these numbers were worth sacrificing the Exynos.

2 TMO executives convo: "Yeah, let's deprive all of our customers of Exynos because it's "limited" to 21Mbps and let's get a 42Mbps chipset so that very select few can get 15 Mbps on an inferior SoC"-"Wow, that's brilliant"

I am curious though . . . is there any application that Exynos&Mali can run that the dual Snapdragon&Adreno 220 can't do?

 

[Mopetar]

I am curious though . . . is there any application that Exynos&Mali can run that the dual Snapdragon&Adreno 220 can't do?

No, but it's important to understand that while these SoCs don't offer much of a difference in meaningful real world performance, they are obviously a direct representation of dick length, therefore it is important to have the longes— er, fastest SoC. Having anything less than the current best, never mind that it will probably be out of date in a few months, obviously decreases a person's worth as human being.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

I am curious though . . . is there any application that Exynos&Mali can run that the dual Snapdragon&Adreno 220 can't do?

If Hummingbird vs the older snapdrgaons was any indication I expect Exynos to be far more capable when it comes to HD video playback.

I'm thinking of moving to that new $30 data plan with 100 minutes Tmobile is offering and I'd be tempted to use the international GS2 over the TMobile one even it is only EDGE just so i could have Exynos.

 

[Fire&Blood]

Right on, I lol'd at your maneuver to take a shot at me.

On topic:

I am curious though . . . is there any application that Exynos&Mali can run that the dual Snapdragon&Adreno 220 can't do?

No. Do they perform equally, if not, is the performance difference tangible every time one uses the phone?

A persistent performance and battery life benefit opposed to taking advantage of a location dependent, highly variable and elusive advantage of 42Mbps. Set aside the hardware and SD cards bottlenecks (most can't read/write faster than 32Mbps) that prevents taking advantage of these speeds, benefit of these hyped network speeds is limited to streaming and large downloads and those lead you straight into the monthly cap. Go get throttled halfway through your billing cycle then come and tell me about the greatness of high speed networks.

 

[Bateluer]

Right on, I lol'd at your maneuver to take a shot at me.

Not sure what you were referring to . . . it was a legit question. Right now, aside from a few niche areas, these two SoCs are mind blowing fast.

Go get throttled halfway through your billing cycle then come and tell me about the greatness of high speed networks.

Don't need a high performance SoC to peg a data cap. T-bolt doesn't have a 2011 SoC driving it, and I can blow through 2GB over LTE in ~60min. Luckily, for me, the battery is the limiting factor, not the data cap. 😛

 

[Fire&Blood]

Not sure what you were referring to . . . it was a legit question. Right now, aside from a few niche areas, these two SoCs are mind blowing fast.

Wasn't directed at you, I quoted you afterwards.

Don't need a high performance SoC to peg a data cap. T-bolt doesn't have a 2011 SoC driving it, and I can blow through 2GB over LTE in ~60min. Luckily, for me, the battery is the limiting factor, not the data cap. 😛

Again, poor wording on my behalf, I should have said "anyone" instead of "you". I didn't even know what phone and plan you had before you posted.

 

[Ualdayan]

Right on, I lol'd at your maneuver to take a shot at me.

On topic:

No. Do they perform equally, if not, is the performance difference tangible every time one uses the phone?

A persistent performance and battery life benefit opposed to taking advantage of a location dependent, highly variable and elusive advantage of 42Mbps. Set aside the hardware and SD cards bottlenecks (most can't read/write faster than 32Mbps) that prevents taking advantage of these speeds, benefit of these hyped network speeds is limited to streaming and large downloads and those lead you straight into the monthly cap. Go get throttled halfway through your billing cycle then come and tell me about the greatness of high speed networks.

Snapdragon has asynchronous cores so while Exynos is faster, Snapdragon should have longer battery life because it can downclock cores independently.

 

[Deeko]

I will take a faster network connection over a marginally faster SoC every time.

 

[ew915]

wow nice matches my verizon LTE uploading speeds 😀

 

[Ualdayan]

wow nice matches my verizon LTE uploading speeds 😀

Which one? The link he did or the picture he posted? In my experience LTE is usually around 10Mbps on the upload (20Mbps on the download) with spikes up to (in my area anyway) 35Mbps down/12Mbps up. Tmobile doesn't seem to be matching/beating LTE, but then again $30 prepaid sure beats the crap out of Verizon's $70+.

 

[Mopetar]

I will take a faster network connection over a marginally faster SoC every time.

For the vast majority of use cases, isn't LTE only marginally faster than HSPA? It becomes even more pointless when most carriers have such a low data cap.

 

[Deeko]

For the vast majority of use cases, isn't LTE only marginally faster than HSPA? It becomes even more pointless when most carriers have such a low data cap.

I'm referring to the T-Mobile Galaxy SII forgoing Exynos in favor of 42Mbps HSPA+. You can still benefit from faster data without going over your cap. I almost never go over 2GB and I would still certainly like to have faster data speed.

 

[alent1234]

Right on, I lol'd at your maneuver to take a shot at me.

On topic:

No. Do they perform equally, if not, is the performance difference tangible every time one uses the phone?

A persistent performance and battery life benefit opposed to taking advantage of a location dependent, highly variable and elusive advantage of 42Mbps. Set aside the hardware and SD cards bottlenecks (most can't read/write faster than 32Mbps) that prevents taking advantage of these speeds, benefit of these hyped network speeds is limited to streaming and large downloads and those lead you straight into the monthly cap. Go get throttled halfway through your billing cycle then come and tell me about the greatness of high speed networks.

Only if you are streaming hd to a tv. My droid pro on CDMA can stream high quality spotify and other music just fine

 

[Brian Stirling]

I will take a faster network connection over a marginally faster SoC every time.

A faster network in theory or a faster network in reality? Put a shitload of heavy data users on any network and you're back to crawling...

But, a faster CPU/GPU will benefit you all the time.


Brian

 

[theeedude]

I think the most compute and graphics intensive thing most users will do on their phone is watching HD video on HDMI output. And the most network intensive thing is streaming that video from the cloud. So in that sense, if your SOC can't decode video at the bitrate that the baseband can supply, beef up the SOC, otherwise, beef up the baseband. From what I understand Snapdragon can already play 1080p video, only makes sense to beef the baseband up so that it can stream it.

 

[Aikouka]

I wonder how strong his signal was while taking those measurements. ~10/42Mbit doesn't seem that great, but signal strength cannot be ignored when looking at such numbers. When I was at the AT&T store, I went through and tested my phone's speed (I had 5 bars -- I assume the store had a femtocell).

I tested it before at another location where I usually bounce between 2-3 bars. I tested it at 3 bars the whole time, and I noticed something rather disturbing... my speedtest varied... a lot. Unfortunately, I lost the results when I forgot to backup before restoring 4.3.5 (restoring from a JB wipes all data), but I would go from about 120KB/s to 20KB/s very randomly. Also, sometimes the test just refused to run... it would sit there on "testing ping...". It makes me wonder if this is the reason why when I load a YouTube video that it just randomly stops loading sometimes.

But anyway... I only ran two tests at the AT&T store and I got between 180KB/s and 260KB/s (I set my speedtest app to kilobytes). So I saw around 50% to 100% increase over my previous best just for having a much better signal.

 

[Brian Stirling]

You will see big swings in download speed based on how heavily the cell site is being hit at that moment. In some places like NYC there are so many users and a limit to how many towers they can have so data rates are often dreadful. Going to a faster network will help but only until the users upgrade to that technology and then ... SSSSLLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW....

Again, data use is increasing faster than bandwidth so get use to bad performance. This will continue until the carriers switch to metered billing and then the folks that are now streaming music and video will have a heart attack when the bill arrives and then stop streaming.

I had tethering on my Evo for over a year and averaged about 600MB/month but there are lots of folks streaming music eating over 5GB/month. Stream or download movies and you can blast past 10GB/month in a heart beat. There was even a guy with the Evo bragging about eating over 50GB/month.

And people wonder why cell service sucks and the carriers are cutting unlimited plans -- what part of no free lunch don't people understand!


Brian

 

[Brian Stirling]

I think the most compute and graphics intensive thing most users will do on their phone is watching HD video on HDMI output. And the most network intensive thing is streaming that video from the cloud. So in that sense, if your SOC can't decode video at the bitrate that the baseband can supply, beef up the SOC, otherwise, beef up the baseband. From what I understand Snapdragon can already play 1080p video, only makes sense to beef the baseband up so that it can stream it.

True enough but even though moving around the UI doesn't demand sustained CPU/GPU power it DOES benefit you when you are moving about. All things being equal a faster SoC will reduce lagging issues.


Brian

 

[Deeko]

A faster network in theory or a faster network in reality? Put a shitload of heavy data users on any network and you're back to crawling...

But, a faster CPU/GPU will benefit you all the time.


Brian

In reality of course, but you assume that every network is automatically over used. I don't have any issues with slow downs on t-mobile. Also you assume that a theoretically faster CPU is going to be noticeably faster in reality. Getting a better Quadrant score doesn't necessarily mean a more responsive device.

 

[Bateluer]

Again, data use is increasing faster than bandwidth so get use to bad performance. This will continue until the carriers switch to metered billing and then the folks that are now streaming music and video will have a heart attack when the bill arrives and then stop streaming.

Course, then the myriad of businesses, and jobs, created based around smartphones fall flat, innovation is stifled, and carriers upgrade their networks at an even slower pace, phone technology slows down because people don't have a need to upgrade, etc.

Metered billing = bad for the consumer. Good for the carrier, but no one else.

 

[theeedude]

True enough but even though moving around the UI doesn't demand sustained CPU/GPU power it DOES benefit you when you are moving about. All things being equal a faster SoC will reduce lagging issues.


Brian

I think it's more of a function of how good the OS and the drivers are at accelerating the UI on the GPU. As iPhone has demonstrated, the GPU hardware has been fast enough to deliver a smooth UI for a while already. You can make a smoother UI with Exynos or Snapdragon by optimizing the software. But there is nothing you can do to increase bandwidth beyond what the baseband supports. So if I had to pick, I'd pick 2x bandwidth over a somewhat faster (on paper) application processor.

 

[Mopetar]

But there is nothing you can do to increase bandwidth beyond what the baseband supports.

Technically you're right, but the obvious software analogy is that you compress the data traveling over the network, essentially making it appear faster. On the other hand, this is already done for a lot of data (e.g. audio and video) so in a way we've already optimized that part of the software. I suppose one could look into compressing other types of data that aren't currently being compressed. If the SoC had dedicated hardware to decompress it, there wouldn't be too much of a penalty to speed/performance. Probably not worthwhile though.