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U.S. LTE Speeds Drop
October 5, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The U.S. has dropped to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have lept ahead some early adopters of the popular cellular system.
The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country’s global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries made much larger gains.
The U.S. was one of the first countries with commercial LTE service when Verizon Wireless launched its network in late 2010. But other countries that adopted the system later started with better technology, and some have secured more frequencies or rolled out enhancements that U.S. carriers haven’t embraced as much, OpenSignal said.
New Zealand scored the highest average speed in the quarter with 36Mbps, coming up from nowhere in the rankings. But perennial standouts like South Korea and Singapore kept getting faster, too. The average LTE speed in Korea is now 29Mbps (up by 4Mbps), and in Singapore it’s 33Mbps, up by 5Mbps.
OpenSignal collects data on cellular performance through a free app that mobile subscribers can use to measure the speed they’re getting and find faster networks. The results announced Wednesday are based on readings from more than 300,000 users worldwide, the company said.
Countries like Hungary, the Dominican Republic and Morocco beat the U.S. in average LTE speed, but they aren’t necessarily smartphone paradises. Mobile users in America can use LTE more of the time, for example, because their carrier’s networks are built out. Subscribers in the U.S. are on LTE 78 percent of the time, on average, making the country No. 10 for what OpenSignal calls “time coverage.” Moroccan LTE may be fast, but 49 percent of the time, users there don’t get it, for example.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/u-s-falls-to-55th-place-worldwide-for-lte-speeds.html
Microsoft To Overhaul Hotmail
Microsoft will debut next month a major overhaul of its Hotmail webmail service, with upgrades across the board, including in areas like spam, security and performance.
“We listened. We learned. We reinvented Hotmail from the ground up,” reads an invitation sent on Friday to journalists for press events to be held on Oct. 3 simultaneously in New York and San Francisco.
“Forget everything you thought you knew about Hotmail. Just don’t forget this date,” reads the invitation.
Hotmail’s primary competitors are Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail. The last time the consumer webmail market got a product jolt was in 2004, when Google surprised the world with Gmail and its then-unprecedented amount of email storage.
At that point, innovation in webmail services had stagnated for years but Gmail shook Microsoft, Yahoo and other webmail providers like AOL out of their comfort zone, as they quickly responded by increasing the size of their email inboxes.