Incredibly disappointing service

[soulstenance]

I got this service as a backup for when Freedom fails. I was in Elmira today where Freedom has really spotty service and I thought I'd give Public a try. I had full bars of LTE but the service was so slow, my speed test failed on the upload (I guess it was so slow that no connection registered). The download was 1Mbps, which is not usable. Every app I was using would either report that I had no connection or just take insanely long to load even basic stuff (text and images).

I switched back to my Freedom SIM at the same location, and somehow eeked out 1 bar of LTE which was 5 times faster than Public's full bars and worked perfectly. Overall a very disappointing experience. I wasn't expecting full LTE speeds with Public, but I was expecting usable service. Ironic that Freedom was still more reliable, even in an area that is not officially considered covered.

[sheytoon]

@gpixel there's no prioritization between the different tiers.

[gpixel]

@soulstenance depending on how saturated the closest tower is, you may be connecting to a further tower because of priority to the higher tier brands

[sheytoon]

Interestingly, only Rogers and Bell have sites in Elmira.... So unless Bell tower was having issues, or Telus core was having issues, and your Freedom phone was roaming on Rogers, it is hard to explain.

There is a shared tower in the east with Bell having highest antenna spots, Rogers having lower ones. The rest of the sites in town (2 Telus, 1 Rogers) are indoor only for specific venues. Other than that, the first site out of town is Bell again, followed by Rogers.

 

[darlicious]

@soulstenance 

Not getting a consistent throttled 4G LTE at 3mbps from pm could relate to the connection to the network. Did you toggle airplane mode on/off with your pm sim card in your phone? You could have had a poor connection. Your freedom sim card which has access to full speed 4G LTE was able to achieve faster download speeds but at a fraction of the speed that is offered. Was it connecting to a freedom tower or more likely roaming on nationwide and connecting to a rogers tower? The area you were in when you were in Elmira could have affected your ability to connect to the bell/telus towers.

https://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html?lat=43.989356&lng=-80.791397&zoom=10&type=Road...

[HALIMACS]

Hey, @gpixel 

I knew there was some validity around the 3G vs LTE data result and your pic is worth 1000 words.

👍

[Helpershelper]

@soulstenance 

Hi there, those bars you see on your phone don’t guarantee anything really as your connection speed has to take into consideration a lot of factors. I’d consult the page below for some tips:

https://www.telus.com/en/bc/support/article/troubleshoot-data-problems

To see if any outages are in your area check:

https://www.telus.com/en/on/outages

That way you can isolate if it’s a device problem or a tower one.

[will13am]

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@soulstenance wrote:

Do you think that would increase the speed/reliability? Seems a strange way of doing it as they say you should get the latency of LTE but throttled to 3G speeds. 1Mbps is more like 2G. I will try that for sure though! 😁

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@soulstenance , the data speed implementation is really weird.  The data speed throttling is only done on LTE to 3 mbits/s up and down which is generally usable for most situations except pure downloads.  On 3G, there is no throttling and so it is the local network traffic that dictates data speed.  Unless the cell towers are loaded up with handling phone calls which gets first priority, 3G speed can be quite a bit faster.  

[gpixel]

@soulstenance 

 

 

[HALIMACS]

@soulstenance

You might find that the 3G setting may be surprisingly effective in certain situations. 

It's worth a switch over just to try.

[soulstenance]

Do you think that would increase the speed/reliability? Seems a strange way of doing it as they say you should get the latency of LTE but throttled to 3G speeds. 1Mbps is more like 2G. I will try that for sure though! 😁

[HALIMACS]

@soulstenance 

Next time, try moving the network setting to 3G then try your data.