Strange 4G behavior with more than one device

[Jason559]

Went in today and looked at every 4G LTE android smart phone at two Verizon corporate stores.  When testing out phones via Ookla's speed test app they ranged from 13mbps-25mbps when running one at a time. The strange thing is that if we ran more than one at a time, the speed would divide up among the phones testing.  For example 1 phone, 25mbps, 2 phones, 11mbps, 3 phones, 7mbps.  All the way up to 6 phones going around 1-3mbps.

The associate assumed that they were overwhelming the single test site so the speed test app was hard set to different testing servers/cities, no difference.

Is having just 6 phones on one tower going to make this type of effect on speeds?  Are them being within 1-2 feet from each other causing this?  It does concern me that this small amount of LTE phones would make such a huge network difference, they had no answers, anyone on here know what could be going on?

[lemew]

Are they running off of servers in store? If they are that would explain it. It may be the proximity to one another, as you pointed out, as well.

[Jason559]

They were connected to LTE, not wifi.  Do you mean they could be connected to a microcell in the store itself?  Any way to confirm if this is the case?

[dmc271]

I think I've seen this reported by another user as well (don't recall the forum).

I just ran a simultaneous test using my TB and UML290 hitting different servers at speedtest.net. The two devices were in different parts of the house (~100 ft apart). DL speed results are as follows:

1. With just one device at a time: 20 Mbps
2. With both devices at the same time: 14 Mbps

Totally unscientific test, and 100 ft is still close, but it's disconcerting nonetheless to think that speeds can be affected so easily.

[#5]

Hi Jason559, I agree that this is strange behavior. Having a few phones all connected to data at once should not affect the data signal. Once thousands of people are in the same location using data, that may change. It seems like the issue is with the speedtest app itself. When you were running the speedtest app on only one phone, the other phones were still picking up 4G, they just weren't running a speedtest. Unless you turned on wifi or airplane mode, there were still the same number of phones connected to data at the same time. Did you try running other speed test applications or just connecting to the browser on one phone while running the speedtest on another? 

For some speedtest apps there are options to choose a different server to run the test. You may get different results when choosing different servers for each phone also.