Is anyone else in the syracuse ny area also experiencing slow data speeds "due to network congestion"?

[diggerdegroff]

every since the implementation of the unlimited data plan, 3 out of 5 phones have been experiencing slower than slow data speeds on our account... I have been in contact with verizon for the last few months, have had several tickets opened and closed, and verizons final answer is it is due to network congestion! It happens all day, every day! It happens from the beginning of our unlimited data cycle, all the way to the end of the data cycle... I have been on the phone more in the last few months with verizon than family, friends, work or anyone else, trying to get a handle on the problem. network engineers, verizon tier 2 tech support all say that it seems like a provisioning issue. then today I was informed that it is due to network congestion, by the executive team (marshal l.) to be more specific! I was on the phone may 8th @ 5:40pm with tier 2 tech support, and the guy I was on the phone with said that it was a provisioning issue and they had a date of the 19th for a resolution, and now the executive team says he has no idea what hes talking about he must have been referring to something else, though he was adamant about it being a nationwide issue! He was indeed very specific about it being an issue with millions of customers like myself! It seems like Verizon is trying to cover their [Removed] As I sit here debating on contacting my attorney, I try to figure what its worth... verizon is not holding up to their end of the contract! I pay a ton of money for the best experience and yet I seem to get service you would expect from t-mobile! Seems almost like our account is being throttled... I mean, network congestion ALL DAY EVERY DAY? seriously? so there is network congestion every single time i pick up one of my $900. phones? one phone will run at 15. mbps and the other will run at 1. mbps download speed... I have been lied to long enough verizon! I want real answers! I will be contacting my attorney in the morning and discussing if it will be worth the fight to sue verizon for breach of contract, kinda like NYS just did with time warner cable over lying to their customers and breaking promises to their customers! these screenshots are from 2 of the phones on the account at different times of day and different dates...

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[smith6612]

Can you run a copy of the app called "LTE Discovery" from the play store? Once installed, please long press on the "LTE" Column of the app, and enable the fields for "SNR" and "RSRQ." Then, post a screenshot of the app with the Location information removed (The app gives you an option to hide the location for screenshots).

This information will help figure out if your phone has poor uplink, downlink, SNR, or if this is actually congestion.

The app won't tell us if your phone is using Carrier Aggregation. This unfortunately requires a rooted device. But if you tell us what phone you have tested speeds on, that'll give us a better picture of what the phone and the network could be capable of.

The speeds in Buffalo, NY have stayed relatively steady. They weren't anything impressive to begin with. We only have 10Mhz of Band 4, 10Mhz of Band 13, some towers have 5Mhz or 10Mhz of Band 2 LTE, and some towers, especially where congestion is the worst, only have Band 13 on them. Unlimited data or not, it's been "meh" for performance.

Now the deal with Time Warner Cable is different. Unlike Verizon Wireless, they are a wireline provider. So they are capable of providing more of a guarantee in speed. The thing that got Time Warner Cable in trouble is giving customers junky "All-in-one" Cable Modem Gateways... which will forever be junky. Because that's just how they happen to be. But anyhow. The complaints stem from the fact that most people happen to be using Wi-FI access, out of the junky provided gateway, and in a market where people were promised "Up to 300Mbps." Most Cable nodes could only do 686Mbps at the time shared across up to a hundred or so modems, unless TWC could cut Cable TV channels out and use the extra room for Internet, and Wi-Fi was so congested that you were lucky to see 100Mbps on 5Ghz, and lucky to see more than 40Mbps on 2.4Ghz. Now the other side of that is, for markets that are not New York City, Time Warner Cable would give people who would subscribe to the 15Mbps or 20Mbps speeds the junky DOCSIS 2.0 modems that Adelphia would hand out. No wonder they slowed down at night. Of course, Time Warner charged $10/m for renting garbage. Unlike Verizon Wireless, who doesn't rent phones out anymore. Nor do they force you to use a specific phone over another.

Of course, I can't do anything about the wireless performance. I get bit in the rear by anything Wireless. I don't count on it, even with Verizon, to be there when I really, really need it. I'm old fashioned despite being quite young, preferring wired access over Wireless any day of the week.

[diggerdegroff]

As you can see by the screenshots from earlier there is also a lot of fluctuation... As per your request, here are screenshots from the app you asked about, and again can see the fluctuation throughout a 15 minute window, 2 phones in the same exact spot at pretty much the same exact time. But accordingly, this is due to network congestion at 1:30 am, while picking up multiple towers. According to everyone that I spoke to at Verizon, I am within a mile range of "8-Towers".@@

[diggerdegroff]

And lets say that it is "network congestion"... what is Verizon going to do to fix the problem? I don't pay for top rate service to get network congestion 24/7... I pay for the best, fastest, most reliable service!

[smith6612]

Thanks for the screenshots!

On face value, there might be a couple of different factors at play here. As Verizon has mentioned, and as the app is showing, it appears you could have an issue with cross-cell interference. That is, where other overlapping towers have the potential to interfere with the connection to and from the tower your phone is attached to. This is common in areas where you are overlapping two sectors from the same tower (the towers are divided into sectors, since the antennas are directional, like a satellite dish, rather than omnidirectional, like an FM Antenna). It's also common in fringe areas, where for a given band, Verizon must have overlap between towers in order to avoid a "hot potato" or a connection drop.

With that said, excessive cell overlap and weak signal contributes to low SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), which is what your phone is reporting. Ideally, the SNR should be above 15dB, and a very good SNR would be above 25dB, which is where LTE prefers to operate. The SNR is a measurement of the signal coming from the tower to the phone. Since you're at 5dB, I can infer that your uplink (your phone to the tower) is likely weaker than that, and that can also contribute to the poor performance. It is harder for the tower to hear your phone than it is for your phone to hear the tower. Since wireless communication in this case is two way, both directions must be working well. If one direction has a poor uplink or is slow, the whole thing suffers.

Since your phone is on Band 2, it is worth keeping in mind that Band 2 was originally 3G / EVDO spectrum. Verizon has been re-farming 3G spectrum into LTE. There's a possibility that they did not optimize band 2 in your area for performance, and left far too much overlap between towers by setting the transmit power too high, or not adjusting antenna tilt properly. The overlap was less of a problem with 3G / EVDO, however LTE is far more sensitive to that stuff and really isn't a fan of overlap.

It is also worth mentioning that Band 2 LTE is *probably* operating at 5Mhz. Which means that for a given tower, assuming all is well, Band 2 can only provide around 36Mbps down, and typically around half of that up best case. Band 13 runs at 10Mhz and Band 4 can be 10, 15, or 20Mhz depending on Verizon's license with the FCC.

What isn't answered is whether your phone is doing Carrier Aggregation. The only way to know if this is occurring, is to enter Engineering mode on the phone. This is a hidden menu that Verizon typically asks Samsung to lock out. With engineering mode, we would be able to see if the phone is connected to more LTE bands besides Band 2, and this would also tell us whether Band 2 is your primary carrier for downlink/uplink, and it also answers the question from above of what the bandwidth size is in Megahertz.

Sorry if any of that doesn't answer the question. But the next step is, try to locate your nearest tower, and drive or walk up close to it. It's best not to walk underneath it, but instead stay maybe a couple thousand feet away if you can get that close. Then open LTE discovery again and check to see if your SNR is higher. If you can get an SNR of about 20dB, and if your phone is on Band 2 or Band 4, run a speed test again to see if there is any improvement.