I set my wife up on Public Mobile and it is working well for her. However, I've noticed that the max download speeds are more limited than I was expecting. They're decent and more than sufficient for her, but still, not quite what I might have expected for Telus or Koodo. (She was on Koodo before.)
Thinking it might just be luck of the draw for wireless conditions right at those times tested, I looked online, and it seems a few people have done comparative tests between Public Mobile and Koodo side by side, and Public Mobile is consistently slower. Well, at best Public Mobile is sometimes similar, but most of the time Public Mobile is slower. For example, one test had two Galaxy S6 phones testing Koodo against Public Mobile tested side by side. Koodo was over 100 Mbps, but Public Mobile was 20ish Mbps. Others have done maybe 5 tests in a row with the same phone models and again, Public Mobile usually was slower. Furthermore, I have never seen a Public Mobile speed test benchmark out there hit over 100 Mbps. In fact, over 60 Mbps seems to be rare.
Are Koodo and Telus given priority over Public Mobile in terms of download (and upload speeds), or is Public Mobile actively throttled (but still provided LTE speeds)? Or is Public Mobile using a more limited LTE feature set? Or is this all just by chance? To be fair to Public Mobile, I don't think I've ever seen truly scientific speed test comparisons between Public Mobile vs Telus/Koodo.
BTW, my iPhone 7 Plus on Fido is consistently slower than Public Mobile on my wife's iPhone 6s for upload speeds in my house, with my Fido consistently in the 1.5-2.5 Mbps range, and her Public Mobile in the 8-15 Mbps range. That's a pretty huge difference, and I'd rather have the faster uploads. This is her iPhone 6s on Public Mobile, to show the decent uploads.
I did some speedtests on an LTE+ phone and I can confirm that Public Mobile's LTE is throttled, it never got download speeds greater than 60 Mbps. However, when I replaced my SIM with a Fido SIM connected to Telus I can achieve over 100 Mbps.
I have to say that for my usage, the speeds I get from Public Mobile are more than adequate.
More testing on a different phone. Same results. I believe that Public Mobile is throttled somewhere in the EPC. All tests were done in the same location.
4 tests with Bell SIM using 2 different servers:
4 tests with PM SIM using the same 2 servers mentioned above:
Signal info showing that CA is equally available for both SIMs (Bell = 302-610 and Telus = 302-220):
There is an organization known as 3GPP that is responsible for defining 3G and LTE standards globally.
3GPP provides updates and new standards constantly and they number these releases at a high level.
Rel-8 was the start of LTE.
Rel-10 was the start of LTE-A.
Rel-13 is the start of LTE-A Pro.
LTE-Advanced (also known as LTE-A) is actually a collection of enhancements, including CA, higher-order MIMO, CoMP, 256 QAM.
http://www.3gpp.org/technologies/keywords-acronyms/97-lte-advanced
Part of the reason for this misunderstanding is the operators themselves don't refer to CA, they just call it LTE-A, which is not very precise.
What you're referring to is Carrier Aggregation (CA), which is one of the prominent features of LTE-A. CA, as described here combines different carriers or channels into one logical channel. This dramatically increases user throughput, but requires specialized hardware inside the phone to take advantage of specific band combinations.
Both Bell and Telus have deployed CA equally in their respective RANs, and all customers have equal access to all CA features across Canada (as long as it is deployed in the eNodeB).
Category numbers are not related to the network at all. They are only used to describe the capabilities of smartphones and other User Equipment (UE).
Here is a good overview of all the UE categories:
http://niviuk.free.fr/ue_category.php
Cat-6 devices are generally CA capable and can provide DL speeds up to 300 Mbps. Cat-4 devices are generally non-CA capable and can provide DL speeds up to 150 Mbps. Cat-9 devices are currently the fastest high-end phones on the market (i.e. Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge).
Category numbers are not necessarily related to CA capability. A Cat-9 device may be able to do 3CA, but another Cat-9 device may only be able to do 2CA.
Also, not all Categories will actually be implemented. They are simply defined in the LTE standards, and manufacturers can choose to make a device for any Category number they wish. As an example, I don't think there's ever going to be a Cat-8 device anywhere. It will simply be too exensive to develop. Higher category numbers are not always faster. Refer to the table in the above link for details.
I finally managed to do some testing with a Bell SIM and PM SIM during off-peak hours under excellent signal conditions (SINR 25+ dB) with the tower unloaded.
AMBR value is not the issue. It is set to 1 Gbps downlink for both Bell and PM subscribers. However, DL speeds are consistenly lower on PM.
I used the same phone, 5 speedtests with Bell using 3 different servers, followed by 4 speedtests with PM, using the same 3 servers. eNodeB (tower) usage was very close to zero at all times. I verified this but cannot share the screenshot on a public forum.
Here are the AMBR confirmations:
Here are the speed test results:
This was tested on a site with B2 + B4 CA, which the phone supports and was verified active for all tests. I don't have a Telus SIM to compare, so I can't be sure if this is strictly a PM issue, or all Telus subscribers. What is clear from this test is that there is definitely a limitation for PM users at the very least (possibly all Telus users). Either way, the issue is with Telus, and not Bell.
It does seem to be a bit slower than Telus (my previous carier) but for the value we get with PM - no complaints at all!
