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HSPA+ varies wildly from country to country. Obviously, no one is going to get 21Mbps, let alone 42Mbps. Thing is, I've noticed (from Speedtest rankings and whatnot) that many European and Asian 3.5G/HSPA+ speeds are pretty close to what the average American gets on Verizon LTE (though I can't speak for latency).
Where I live, I can get the equivalent of 10Mbps+ quite often, and around 14 during the early morning hours, and I live in a very saturated city. LTE just rolled out here a few months ago, and from what I've read, users get around 20Mbps if signal permits. So, yes, LTE is obviously faster, but it's not really 4G speed like many telcos claim, and our 3.5G/HSPA+ speeds aren't all that bad here. There's obviously much more room for LTE to get faster though (4x4 MIMO - 20MHz supposedly goes up to 325Mbps), but I suspect most telcos will have moved on to totally different tech before that.
Edited 2012-10-30 14:47 UTC




Member since:
2005-11-13
How does that equate to real-world speeds though? When I was on Verizon and had their Galaxy Nexus, I could get 15-20mbps when the reception was good. However, the radio on that phone was ass, so I switched to the GSM version.
On my GSM Gnex with AT&T, the fastest I've managed is about 4mbps, and that was after tweaking the APN settings a bit, with 4 bars of HSPA+. A friend of mine with the same phone can sometimes hit 5-6mbps on his Gnex with T-mo, but a lot of times, his speeds are lower than mine.
So you see, that's a pretty big difference. It's not a huge deal for day-to-day usage, but really sucks when tethering
Edited 2012-10-30 05:58 UTC