vanillabean

What’s your take on Verizon throttling these days? My iPhone never gets past 5 mpbs anywhere in the U.S. With VPN turned on yesterday, it was up to 80 mbps. Have users been better off in the two years since the Federal Communications Commission voted in favor of repealing the net neutrality policies?

Moderator2

​​​​​​Strange behavior you are seeing. My Samsung S9 has no problems with fast throughput on VZ when in 4G-LTE. In my home neighborhood it is about 12 Mbps, but a mile closer to a main thoroughfare it is closer to 50 Mbps. Rarely anywhere I travel in the U.S. It is under 10 Mbps. This morning at San Diego Airport it was at 15.

Need

Never get past 5mbps sound to me it was your VPN speed. Maybe your VPN suddenly gets a huge speed increase or you somehow turned off your VPN?

TWA884

Well, at my home, downhill from yours, I'm lucky to get one bar. And at a coffee shop on that thoroughfare, where we regularly meet for coffee, Verizon's data speed has been so lethargic that I often have connect to the store's WiFi to be able to use my apps and moderate flyerTalk, err, surf the web (and I generally don't care to connect to unsecured WiFi networks).

vanillabean

You may want to try to install a VPN app on your phone. NordVPN has been working quite well for me.

"Unfortunately, with the loss of Net Neutrality rules, Verizon now has free reign to throttle your internet speeds at will, for almost any reason. Thankfully, you can bypass Verizon throttling easily in just a few minutes. ... The best way to bypass Verizon speed throttling is to use a virtual private network, or VPN."

https://flixed.io/stop-verizon-throttling-3-minutes/

gfunkdave

Assuming you didn't exceed your monthly data cap (even "unlimited" plans have them) then it's probably just local node congestion.

For comparison, I just ran a speed test on my phone and got 111 Mbps down and 14.1 up, here in sleepy Maine.

TWA884

Not even close, I have 32% remaining with one day left in the billing cycle.

At home, it's topography, I live in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Where I meet Moderator2 for coffee, it's network congestion. It adjacent to one of the nation's busiest freeways which runs parallel to the main thoroughfare that he mentioned in his post.

bchandler02

I used to see the same. Struggled to ever get over 2M on Verizon no matter what. In some areas, VPN would help. Others, it was just clearly an overloaded network.

The solution for me was walking away from VzW.

KRSW

These days it's most likely due to the tower being overloaded. Verizon's network was built with metered plans in mind, thus high bills would naturally limit data usage. When Verizon started their kind-of-unlimited plans, data usage skyrocketed and they're behind the 8-ball with their network. It also didn't help that a year or two before their unlimited plans that they were actually turning off rented tower sites to save money and trying to bulk up their owned tower sites to compensate, with predictably bad results which is when I jumped to T-Mobile.

Need

I did not know Verizon is that bad on data bandwidth. I was on AT&T and the data speed was not good here in SoCal. That's why I switch to T-mobile. My T-mobile speed at home is 100+ Mbps one mile up a mountain. Pretty much everywhere I go I get at least 40 Mbps. It is cheaper than AT&T by a lot, with free international data roaming, and free Netflix. I was with AT&T for 15 years and all they could offer me to stay was giving me discount on DIRECTV LOL.

gfunkdave

Virtually every Vzw macro site anywhere near a population center has fiber backhaul (actually, that goes for all carriers). Some remote macro sites have microwave backhaul. Every Vzw small cell has fiber backhaul. Vzw has sunk billions of dollars in the last couple years into building out a Verizon-owned fiber network (search for Verizon One Fiber) to support business customers and cell sites.

The issue is almost certainly one or a combination of:
1. The site is overloaded. Carriers fix this by building small cells these days. I didn't used to be able to use my phone in downtown Portland during tourist season. Data slowed to a crawl. Last summer Vzw built several small cell nodes throughout the area and I now get 100 Mbps download all the time, including in places (like the restaurant in my office building) where my phone would oscillate between one bar and No Service.
2. Your phone is older and doesn't support new bands being used. A colleague had an iPhone SE that he used with T-mobile and complained incessantly about their coverage. When he got a new phone that supported Tmo's new 600MHz bands, his problems went away.
3. Your phone is older and doesn't support the newest flavor of LTE that carriers use.

TWA884

I don't know where in Southern California you are located. In my neighborhood, in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains in the West San Fernando Valley, T-Mobile's reception is non-existent.

Need

Rancho Cucamonga at the foothills near 15 and 210. Tmobile must have like lots of towers here. Before I upgraded my Spectrum from 60 Mbps to 400Mbps, Tmobile connection is faster than my WiFi at home. We are still using Tmobile hotspot at backup when power or Spectrum goes out. I usually go all over greater LA and Orange County and everywhere I went I got great Tmobile signal. Our cars came with AT&T data connections, and just about everywhere we go, the signal of Tmobile is stronger than AT&T. And Tmobile is going to merge with Sprint.... I have Tmobile on the whole family except my own line is on Google Fi. I rarely have to force switch to Sprint to get a good signal. But between Sprint & Tmobile, I pretty much always could get a good signal.

tmiw

As someone who was probably on Sprint way longer than I should have been, I feel like it was pretty poor in most of Southern California (especially in San Diego since low band LTE couldn't be rolled out until recently due to US-Mexico border issues).

Going back to the topic of the thread, though, I concur with others that congestion is the likely reason. However, carriers do throttle transfers that they consider to be video (mainly to keep quality to 480p in the case of T-Mobile at least). I'm not sure if that's what's happening to OP though.

vanillabean

I am reminded that the iPhone 6 released September 2014 is a year and a half older than the iPhone SE released March 2016.

When iOS 12.4.1 was released in August, I soon thought that was the end of my iPhone 6 being supported, and here we are, being given 12.4.4 yesterday.

This is the same iPhone 6 on 12.4.3 at a comfortable speed on VPN-boosted Verizon the other day. It looks like my upgrade can wait until September 2020.