this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
656 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59578 readers
2862 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have mint: The connection sucks, you get deprioritized against other traffic so bandwidth is usually garbage. It's fine if you just need text and phone calls though.
Is that what’s going on? So often since I switched to Mint I’ll have full bars and can’t do anything online.
That's every third party lease phone service and the difference between paying for a company that owns their own towers or network like Verizon, t mobile, and at&t, compared to any of the ones like mint who just use the towers that any of the above carriers own. If you use anything like Mint, you get bumped to the bottom of the bandwidth availability.
Otherwise why would anyone pay more for the same service?
I have mint too and haven't had much trouble with bandwidth. But to be fair I don't use my phone for very much while not on wifi, mostly just streaming music and Google maps.
I think this experience might be region-dependant. I'm in a major city on Mint and I routinely see 900Mbps+ down and never have any issues with streaming. I think the lowest speed test I ever saw was around 200Mbps.
In my city 90% of the time it's perfectly fine. Then there are a few dead spots in the t mobile network that are really frustrating and I'm usually in those spots once a week.
Then I visited some family in Colorado and it was awful and my phone was essentially useless without Wi-Fi. T mobiles network is very hit or miss but no way am I paying $70 / month or whether the going rate for Verizon, etc.
This has always been my point when people ask about performance. I'm usually on wifi anyway and I've only found dead zones at the bottom of rural valleys and inside actual caves, but even if it was five times worse than it is, it's not worth having to pay five times more for me. I just don't need mobile data that critically all the time, and I do have reliable data almost everywhere. Plus, the networks are all still growing and improving, and Americans don't seem to understand how much more expensive and under-developed most of the US mobile networks are compared to many parts of Europe and Asia, to say nothing of our ISP situation.
I was worried about that since they buy access to towers, thank you for sharing your experience. Are able to see when that happens in a concrete way, or is more just the noticable lag?