Going to get a new phone - Question about 3G

[Olitheon]

Good day everyone. I am planning on buying a new phone later today, possibly.  I have a question about the coverages.

First off, I am currently paying for 6.5GB of 3G speed.  The phone I am looking at (Xiaomi Mi 6) is not fully compatible with all of the LTE bands, but IS compatible with the 3G bands... My current phone is almost always displaying LTE.  I use my phone in Scugog and around the Trent Severn Waterway to watch streams or upload photos/videos quite often (even play some online games tethering off my phone - if it is raining out on the lake).  So my question is, how reliable/fast is the 3G coverage in those areas?  Is it better to go with a phone that has full LTE compatibility, or will the phone I am looking at be OK? 

Thanks in advance for the help!  I am off to bed now (I work nights), so I won't reply for at least 8 hours from this post. 🙂

[Olitheon]

Thanks for the replies everyone!  I have a PC on my boat and I mainly play MMOs, and only rarely while up there (if it is raining or no one else is up at the yacht club and I am not fishing 😛 ). So it seems the 3G coverage would be adequate for my needs.  Since I stream TV and movies and stuff, I wanted the higher data cap rather than the faster speeds.  Thanks again for the help!  I will probably get that Mi 6 I was looking at.  The other option was the Mi Mix 2, which is literally the same thing with a bigger screen and more frequencies for $100 more.  But I don't like excessively big screens on phones. 5" is perfect for my needs. 🙂

[Effort]

I just spent 20 minutes playing 5v5 casual on Vainglory on 3G. Overall it was very playable but there was a 10 to 20 second window where the game froze because the connection was lost and when it came back, it was like everything was going in fast forward. It only happened once in 20 minutes but preferably it not happen at all.

I'll have to try tethering and trying some CSGO or Path of Exile on PC and see how it is there later.

[will13am]

@Olitheon, I am not familiar with that particular model of Xiaomi phone.  I do know that they produce a lot of variants on all their models.  Most have a global version which will have the key LTE bands like band 4.  I got a Redmi note 5 AI for a friend which had bands 4, 5, 7.  LTE coverage was good with just these 3 bands.  It would have been nice to have band 2 as well. 

[Effort]

You're better off using 3G mode. I get at least double the speed than the throttled LTE and the latency isn't noticeable playing mmos like Maplestory but I don't know how much that plays in to effect. I use an OnePlus 5t.

I recently downloaded Vainglory and I'm going to try that on 3G and LTE to check if it's stable to play on data. So far it has been playing against bots or tutorials so there isn't any player connectivity yet.

[computergeek541]

Whie LTE does have better pings/latency, I find that the difference can be sometimes minimal.  In most cases, does someone really care of the ping is 20ms compared to 30ms? - probably not.

By the way, if your phone is connected to a 3g network, you probabably get a faster sustained throughput. (Suppoedly no speed throttle on 3g network for 3g speed data plans)

[thirstyturtle18]

The LTE coverage generally overlaps areas that already have HSPA/3G coverage, so you should be fine for coverage. Keep in mind, LTE does have better latency.