Why did things like FB or browsing the web previously work fine with 3G service on cell phones but will no longer load with less than 4G/LTE in most cases?
In: Technology
If your phone has 4G and you are in an area where there is a 4G network the phone will only drop back to 4G when the reception is so bad that the 4G signal do not work, the 3G signal will be marginal so the bandwidth will be low. With a phone with just 3G it will use that when reception is good.
So you are comparing 3G with good reception in the past to 3G with a bad reception today.
If you have an android phone you can force it to use old standards. Go to “Settings/Network & Internet/Mobile Network/Prefered Network Type” and choose 3G. If to do this in an area with good reception you will have a comparable situation to 3G in the past and I suspect that the internet access from the phone will work fine. I would not be surprised if the speed will be higher then you had with 3G in the past because fewer devices use the network so there is more bandwidth available for you.
Essentially as much as speeds are faster now. The things we view online are much larger file size.
The most noticeable example is videos. 10 years ago 4k video didnt exist and you can tell if you look at videos from back then. But now even our cellphones can film 4k video and all that extra quality results in larger file size for the same length of video.
So if the speeds are 10x faster now for example but the files are 20x larger things will still take twice as long to load.
Aside from what others have already said, many companies have made their site pages bigger. Even if they look the same, they could be loaded down with hidden javascript and other and feature and performance code.
They do it to make their site feel better and operate more smoothly or to add new features. They also do it because most people have higher bandwidth, lower latency connections now, so most people’s connections can handle the increased size.
Unfortunately that can make for a bad experience for people with slower connections.
Anyway this isn’t always the case, but it is sometimes, and might especially cause problems when you’re using something like 3G.
Latest Answers