Is Public Mobile's LTE throttled vs Telus/Koodo? Who here has the fastest Public Mobile speed?

[Eug]

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.

[sheytoon]

I realized I never provided a good speed test result. Here's one showing 400 Mbps with a signal that's not even ideal!

[EltonB]

Hey guys,
Just saw this thread!
Now I'm not the one to post here often and say nice things, but I have to share this.
I get all kinds of different LTE speeds, some high, some low. I tested before the introduction of the new 3G pricing, and one time I got the max speed 117mbps/46mbps.
This is the fastest I've gotten and I have a Huawei P8 Max from China.
Hope this helps!

[zhadj030]

@imm1304 Yes, I got a second hand G4, which got stuck in a bootloop within a week, I tried to talk to LG but they refused since I was not the original buyer, so that got me a really bad impression about them, and really turned me off about LG products in general.

I loved the G4 in the 2 days I had it especially the camera but after this issue,it really made me look away, and the fact the FM radio was turned off and no great support on XDA just made the transition from it quicker, now looking for something else to replace my Galaxy S5

[imm1304]

@zhadj030, you heard correctly about the bootloop issues. There is a great potential in these phones though and they still offer excellent value for the $ spent.

My G4, much like I had read online, entered a bootloop after 11 months of use.  I called LG and they replaced the motherboard for free.  The phone had to be sent to them for the repair and it took about 8 days.

Before and after the bootloop issue, the phone continued to work extremely well.  I still have it sitting around and use it as a backup or to play around with custom roms etc.  

The G5 is working great.  I have had it for over 8 months as my daily driver. I put it through a lot of heavy usage.  LG claims to have fixed the bootloop issue on the G5.  While I was talking to LG on the pohne during the G4 bootloop issues, they told me that even if my LG phone is out of warranty and experiences the bootloop issue, they will fix it for free.. just give them a call.  That reassurance was good enough for me and the G5 was selling at less than half price compared to its competitor S7 or the iphone.  

[zhadj030]

Thanks @imm1304 . I heard that LG G4 and G5 were plagged with bootloops in a crazy hardware defect.

[purewater]

I'm using iPhone 6s Plus.

[Michael77]

Nice! 🙂

[imm1304]

@zhadj030, I am using LG G5.  You should be able to get 200+Mbps speeds with all the flagship phones from the last 2-3 years.

[zhadj030]

@imm1304 @purewater What kind of phones you guys are using, just out of curiousity.?

[imm1304]

Those are impressive speeds @purewater!  Just be careful,  high speed connection burns through data super fast. You may lose 150MB in one test. Here is my speedtest when I realised I had leftover data near the end of 90 days: 

[purewater]

[jpar]

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@etsat wrote:
I'm on band 2, according to LTE Discovery.

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CA, no doubt?

[zhadj030]

Well we have to thank @sheytoon for his help then. Thanks to him we are noticing a lot of improvements. I recently hit 79 Mbps as well on a LTE cat 4 phone so I am happy with that.

[MK78]

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@etsat wrote:
Just got this result in downtown Vancouver. Huge difference from the 20/5 from about a month ago.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/2950691795

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Wow, that's crazy fast. Probably used quite a bit of data just for that!

[etsat]

I'm on band 2, according to LTE Discovery.

[zhadj030]

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@etsat wrote:
Just got this result in downtown Vancouver. Huge difference from the 20/5 from about a month ago.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/2950691795

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That is a huge difference. Maybe that's the best someone had so far.

What band were you in ?

[etsat]

Just got this result in downtown Vancouver. Huge difference from the 20/5 from about a month ago.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/2950691795

[pakmode]

Wow. These are some dramatic improvements in the results. 

[srlawren]

@zhadj030 that's unfortunate!  I think I had slower speeds on band 4 as well.  Maybe try again on another band later to see if it helps.

[zhadj030]

Unfortunately no improvements on my end. Standing in front of a tower but still in the 20s

Edit : B04  , RSRP ; -81 dB    SINR: 29.1dB

[srlawren]

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@sheytoon wrote:
If you're going to be in downtown Vancouver, try testing near 1060 Howe Street. You should be able to see the antennas at the top of the building at Howe/Helmcken. This should be a good location for testing.

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@sheytoon didn't get over to that area and didn't get much chance while I was in the Alberni & Thurlow area.  But I did get over 90Mbps when I remembered to test at the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station on the way home.  Not bad!  I don't remember what band I was on but was showing around -80 dBm for RSRP on my LTE Discovery widget at the time, so must have been a decent signal.

[sheytoon]

If you're going to be in downtown Vancouver, try testing near 1060 Howe Street. You should be able to see the antennas at the top of the building at Howe/Helmcken. This should be a good location for testing.

[srlawren]

I tested again from The Fish Company restaurant at the entrance of Granville Island yesterday and managed to his 76.68Mbps down and 17.57Mbps up.  Definitely much higher than previous for me.  I'll try agin from downtown tomorrow.

[NDesai]

@computergeek541 We were told on the day I posted the good news 🙂

[computergeek541]

I am also seeing dramatic improvement.  I think it was in April that I mentined that I got 78Mbps which was new to me.  Now that I got test result of more than 130Mbps, I think it's safe to say that test, sheytoon's knowledge, and reports from other users confirms it.

132Mbps isn't bad at all considering that my phone theoretically maxes out at 150Mbps.  I can't say exactly when this extreme boost in speed happened, but I don't believe things were this fast even a week ago.  Unfortunately, I can't say for certain as I can't run the speedtest.net app on a regular basis or it would burn through by data amount very, very quickly.  One test at these speeds is using up almost 200MB! 

From what I see,  the increase in speeds is very location dependent.  I can't say if it's because tweaking was still being done, but in the past few days, speeds were often about the same as before or worse (but not better) for the few times I tried.  I noticed that it's only a specific tower ID that seemed to give me the faster speed in my home area. 

[sheytoon]

@computergeek541
I looked up the eNodeB, Cell ID and PCI. He's on Band 2 (1900 MHz).

[computergeek541]

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@NDesai wrote:

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@sheytoon wrote:
Try CellMapper instead... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cellmapper.net.cellmapper

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That worked, i am on B1 and getting contant ~80mbps. 

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As sheytoon was saying, there is no Band I anything in Canada, so that's got to be bad app software programming.  Carriers can't use a band that they aren't allowed to and that hasn't been allocated by industry Canada.  Perhaps it's really Band 4?  I ask that because many people often confuse the two because of the way Band IV is often written as 1700/2100.

[MK78]

Well curiosity got me. I went up the road where i know i face a tower straight on. This is an impressive result, compared to what most of us were seeing before this core network fix!

[sheytoon]

@MK78
Usually when there's a speed limit imposed from the core network, it won't have any effect if you can't reach that limit due to signal conditions on the RAN.

Unless your profile had a very low limit like 35 Mbps, I would guess that your scenario is just a coincidence. In any case, it doesn't matter now, hope you are enjoying the faster speeds!

[MK78]

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@sheytoon wrote:
@MK78
I think that's just a coincidence. You're not achieving peak signal conditions, so any improvements on the core would be transparent in those circumstances.

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How do you figure? I never hit 65mbps EVER on PM, even under peak signal conditions, so getting 65 with only 3 bars is a very good improvement.

In this same location before I was getting 33-34 max, with the same 3 bars, and also with full signal.

I'll post once I test under better signal conditions.