Views from the Northeast: My experience on the Verizon Wireless 4G network for the past year.

Being the type of person that likes to be on the bleeding edge of new technology, I tend to get most of the new devices that fall into that area. So when the cell industry started talking about their move from a 3G service to a 4G service, I kept a close eye on when it would be available in my area. Then in March of last year, my carrier Verizon Wireless rolled out the first handset with 4G, The HTC Thunderbolt. Along with the roll out of the handset came access to the 4G network at the same time. Since I have spent a whole year on this new service, I figured it would be time to give a true assessment on how it performs. My experiences will be from launch all the way through last night and everything in between. I want to disclose that I am not an employee of Verizon nor am I being paid for this story by anyone. This is just my experience with the new technology.

For those that have no clue what I am talking about, let me explain as easily as I can. 3G and 4G are short for third generation and forth generation. 4G is designed to have faster download speeds than 3G, to the boasted amounts of up to 10 times faster. What does this mean to us as consumers? It means nothing if you don’t have a smart phone and access the internet. If you do any type of surfing on your phone, it gives you faster page loading and downloading of files and music.

March 1, 2011 is when I started using the 4G network for Verizon Wireless and had set an expectation level of some increased speeds but would never get what Verizon was preaching. As service rolled out, a lot of talk was how much faster the 4G service would be and that it would rival home internet service providers. I work for Comcast so I use the Xfinity internet service at my home. I have the standard service and it has been more than adequate for what I need it to do. To say my wireless phone would come close to the 18 – 20 Megabit speeds I get on my home service was quite a prediction. I have to say, when I first got on the network, the 4G service was as fast if not faster at time as the home service. I use the speedtest.net app for the phone and my home service and at time of launch in my area my home service was getting 16 Megabits while my Thunderbolt phone was getting 30 Megabits! Of course there was not as many people with 4G phones on the network so I knew at some point these speeds would disappear. I just didn’t think it would be a constant degrade to where I’m at now.

As the network grew in this area, so did the service problem I experienced. I’m a realist and knew 30 Megabits was not going to be a steady download speed but after three months, the 30 went down to 10 Megabits on a good day. I hadn’t changed how I was testing the service; still using the HTC Thunderbolt and speedtest.net app. It just made me wonder how reliable this new 4G service would be if after a three month time frame the service performance had dropped more than 50%. If that was the only problem Verizon had to worry about they would have been a happy company. At the six month mark or so, Verizon Wireless had something happen to them that they would never have seen, the entire 4G service crashed! For a company that bases its sole reason for the cost for their service is their network reliability, this was a crushing blow to the new network. As a consumer, I wasn’t too happy with the fact that my service was spotty at best for almost two days and having an unlimited data plan didn’t warrant me getting any credit for the time the service was down. At least that’s what I was told when I called into customer support. But I can live with that as long as I can keep a consistent level of performance from Verizon. Since the restoral of that outage, my 4G service is a mere pittance of what I use to get.

I have made it a point of tracking my speeds at different times but have kept the phone and tool I use to track the speeds the same. On average, I get 5 Megabits compared to the 30 Megabits I use to get a little over a year ago. I find I spend more time flipping over to my wireless signal and surfing that way which defeats the purpose of having a 4G phone in my opinion. I would consider myself to be a heavy user of the internet on my phone. I go through about 2GB to 3GB worth of data a month. Now if you ask me how much of that is done on the 4G network, I would say in the beginning almost all of it. Now, if I hit 1GB on the network that is a lot. I am forced to flip to a wireless signal more time to complete a task or just to speed up page loads. Just last month in my town Verizon had a release on how they activated or “went live” with a 4G tower in my town. And the news from that is my service has gotten worse.

Final verdict for me on the level and performance of the 4G network? It has its moments but can I justify the costs of what is being passed along to the customer, no I cannot. A typical 4G handset can run into $200 or more. Data plans have been moved from unlimited to cap levels based on usage. If you are currently using a 3G handset, moving into a 4G handset you will see a marked difference but nothing that will knock your socks off. Now if anyone from Verizon wants to lend me another handset to do testing on, I would have no problem reporting my results back on that. I understand that maybe the handset is limiting the service but going from 30Mb to 5Mb is a bit of a stretch to blame the handset. Would I go out and buy another 4G handset? Let me put it this way, I just dropped my wife down from the HTC Thunderbolt which is a 4G handset to an IPhone 4S which is a 3G handset. I’m going to include some screen shots of the testing done over the last 24 hours where no known service issues had been reported from Verizon Wireless or Comcast and I’ll let you be the judge on the numbers.

If anyone has any questions or just looking for some more info on my tests, feel free to email me at viewsfromthenortheast@gmail.com or leave a comment below.