The world that built 3G and 4G is different from the one that is building 5G. So they take further steps, like cutting users who use too much data in a month back so that other users can get what they are paying for. It makes them look bad and can cause their software to flake out. Nobody likes slow data speeds or things to stop working because the connection keeps dropping, and your carrier likes it even less than we do. When that happens, we see slower speeds or dropped connections. It works great until there are more users who are using data at once than the equipment can handle. This is a very simplified explanation of how a modern wide area wireless data network operates but it gives us a great idea of how users are managed when are requesting more data than can be served at any one time. If you're not trying to use the network your turn in the queue is skipped and given to a user who is trying to use the network. Left unchecked, your phone could probably use all the bandwidth that a cell site has to offer.Ī cell tower can only have so many connected users though, so the software also will switch users in and out of a connected state. This is done fast enough so that your connection doesn't get interrupted (packets are acknowledged before they timeout waiting for a response) so we never notice it. Switching is one way of making sure it never happens - every user who is actively taking a portion of the bandwidth gets a slot with a specific amount of time they can use it and things are rapidly switched around to all the connected users. There are several ways the software that runs a base station can cope with this - they just don't let any user have as much of the total capacity as possible, ever. If you can see network speeds of 50 Mbps down and 25 Mbps up, you have the potential to use most of the bandwidth a sector station is capable of delivering. And that's counting data going two ways, both to a user and coming back from a user. A bigger station might serve two carriers and have eight sectors so that means 84 Mbps per carrier at once. Let's say a small base station (the hardware that runs what we call a cell tower) that serves a single carrier has three sectors (a rough average) so it can handle 63 Mbps of data at any one time. That same single-sector 5 MHz cell can only deliver about 21 Mbps in total. The equipment that powers your carrier's network has limits. I used voice calls here to demonstrate how IP-based data can use so much more bandwidth than voice - IP calls use 10 times as much data as voice calls. For VoIP or VoLTE calls, the number is drastically lower because the quality is drastically higher and uses more bandwidth (somewhere around 128Kbps on average). For "regular" voice calls at 12Kbps, a rough estimate is about 90 users on a single 5MHz sector if they are all active at once. But the way it actually works is kind of interesting it's just a bit too wordy to stick in the agreement blurb.Ī cell phone tower (a cell) can only serve a limited number of people at once. ![]() ![]() That's why your carrier can get away with dropping a single line about the whole thing into some agreement they hope you never read. (Image credit: Derrek Lee / Android Central)Įasy answer: when you use too much data and the carrier is the only one that gets to decide how much is too much.
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