As Boston Marathon runners coped with bad weather on the course during the recent race, there was an invisible competition going on among wireless carriers — and one of the (legal!) performance enhancers in use was carrier aggregation.
Benchmarking company Global Wireless Solutions reported that according to testing conducted prior to and during the marathon, AT&T has deployed four component-carrier carrier aggregation and the other national wireless carriers were utilizing 3C CA to boost network capabilities at sites along the marathon route. AT&T took first place in GWS’ testing with the most category wins, followed by T-Mobile US in second place, Verizon in third and Sprint in fourth.
About 500,000 people typically gather along the marathon route, including both runners and observers. The nature of the event makes for a lot of social media postings of photos and video, noted Paul Carter, CEO of GWS. GWS conducted tests that mimicked user posting behavior, Carter said, including new capabilities to generate actual Facebook posts.
GWS’ testing took place along the entire marathon route prior to the race, with particular focus on the finish line on the day of the vent.
Prior to the marathon, “we literally started at one end and drove the entire route, start to finish. Then we doubled back and at every mile marker, stopped, waited for a period of time … to collect voice and data samples at each location along the way so we could then collate that with the whole day’s data on the actual day of the run itself,” Carter said.
Carter said that GWS collected about 9,000 voice and data samples, using Rohde & Schwarz’s SwissQual QualiPoc backpack test set-up and Samsung Galaxy S8 devices. Carriers were ranked using GWS’ OneScore rubric, which weights performance based on how consumers are most likely to use their devices.
“What was interesting was that obviously, most of the networks had prepared pretty well for this marathon,” Carter said. While all the networks tied in their reliability scores, according to GWS, AT&T “finished at the top for video performance, tied with T-Mobile for data speed and overall data performance, and tied with T-Mobile and Verizon for social media.” T-Mobile US did particularly well in data speeds, the company reported, clocking the fastest upload speeds for selfies (AT&T was second) and for posting to Facebook.
GWS also did maximum throughput testing designed to check network capacity, although Carter noted that most consumers won’t ever get maximum throughput — but the network capabilities were nonetheless impressive at various points along the route. GWS saw peak speeds for Verizon and AT&T that climbed as high as about 150 Mbps in some cases, Carter said, with T-Mobile US reaching about 120 Mbps at one location, and Sprint achieving 80 Mbps at one location.
AT&T, Carter said, was the only carrier to utilize four component carrier aggregation with just under 80 MHz of bandwidth, while the other carriers used 3C CA. AT&T and T-Mobile US also utilized 256 QAM modulation, he added, and all the carriers “used quite a bit of two-way MIMO in the areas where we saw the super-fast speeds.” Verizon, he said, leveraged some four-way MIMO as well.
“I think these guys are getting really good at what they do,” Carter said. “The networks are getting ready for the future, and the future is here today, in many ways.”
Image copyright: sepavo / 123RF Stock Photo
