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Northstream updates LTE experiences on TeliaSonera, looking a little better
Indeed, just as we said in our last look at the topic, the old adage of "your mileage may vary" most definitely applies here. Consulting firm Northstream has updated its first look at TeliaSonera's worlds-first commercial LTE network, emphasizing that it wasn't disappointed with performance at all -- they'd gotten a scant 12Mbps down previously (we're delighted to be able to call 12Mbps "scant," by the way), but further testing reveals that it's a little more complicated than that. Like any wide-area wireless network, performance is a voodoo formula of location, speed, network utilization, moon phase, and whether you're casting evil stares at the modem, and Northstream was able to see performance of around 25Mbps regularly with a few bursts up above 40Mbps. For a first-gen 4G network, that's more like it -- it's an encouraging sign both for TeliaSonera's customers and for folks looking forward to near-term LTE deployments around the world.
Not so fast: testing finds world's first LTE network isn't very 4G-ish
In a rather disappointing example of "your mileage may vary," market research firm Northstream has put TeliaSonera's shiny new LTE network -- the world's first to go commercial -- to the test, coming away with some disappointing conclusions. The bottom line is that they never managed to go above about 12Mbps downstream, a pretty wild figure considering that Ericsson is in the process of rolling out 84 purely theoretical megabits per second right now using plain old HSPA+ for 3 Scandinavia. The bright side is that they managed a fat 5Mbps on the upstream and experienced consistently lower latency than on the area's 3G networks; in fact, the firm ended up coming away with a glowing impression of the service, assuming (probably accurately) that this is just the first baby step in finding out what LTE is really capable of. And hey, some lucky jerks are getting over 42Mbps down, so it's a crap shoot anyway.
