Not sure why so many are pooh pooh'ng this. I consider the quality of display and the speed of modem two most important aspects of modern smartphones. Not everyone lives next to cell towers or in high density areas like NYC. I actually do live in NYC, but in less desirable area where avg download speed is ~2mps (Oneplus 5T on TMobile), but it was much slower and frustrating on my older phone (Note 4 on AT&T).
The speed you get is far more dependent on the signal strength, not the speed of the modem. That only comes into play when you have a perfect signal, so realistically (as a perfect signal is rare), modem speed plays almost no part in speed limitations.
It does come into play in weak signal situations. Consider support for more spatial streams (4x4 mimo) helps with reception in cell edge areas and when noise levels are high or multipath interference is a factor. Also every modem/antenna pairing has limits programmed in where they'll drop a cell or switch to a different layer (band) with less bandwidth.
No iphone uses 4x4 mimo. Maybe for battery, or maybe Jony couldn't make it pleasing looking enough in the X, but its lack is very much is a factor affecting quality of service including speed in non-ideal environments.
Are there any reliable objective numbers and comparisons for this? While mimo is a great technology, it is trivial to “hold your iPhone right way” and get the same benefits, I feel mimo has become a marketing ploy for companies to push their latest without any perceptible impact to users.
There’s a perceptable impact to users with mimi and it specifically takes advantage of multipath. This is not a case of marketing fluff.
However, 256QAM is something you’ll probably only see in ideal situations as it requires very good signal, that’s the one that edged out gigabit speeds in the lab.
My service is regularly shit on America’s best network in NYC. iPhones used to be very good at this. Now I can’t make phone calls/drop in the same location, on the same cellphone.
LAA simply seems like the cell providers way to charge me for use of frequencies I could otherwise use for free.
A key reason I'm happy to pay cell providers so much money is because they have licenses to use lots of spectrum at high transmission powers to give me service nearly anywhere.
WiFi, it's free cousin, has lower transmission power, but in most cities one is always within range of free WiFi (even if roaming between hotspots is painful!).
When cell providers are allowed onto the free spectrum, they will use up all the available bandwidth, degrading free service and forcing users to pay for their (normally free) bandwidth.
