Carriers based in the United States have been recently working hard to further expand their overall userbase of 4G wireless networks. Today, a new study was released that confirms how the increased efforts are essentially working and that combined, the four major carriers in the nation have a total of over 100 million 4G LTE subscribers spread across the country. Unfortunately, the same study has revealed that even with this shockingly large number, the average data transfer speeds of cellular networks are still exceptionally low. This means that even if the carriers are getting an increased amount of users, they haven’t responded by offering faster cellular networks which at some point might be addressed by their ever-growing userbase.
This study comes from a company called Kwicr, a small startup which has reportedly created a new kind of network to surpass the current outdated 40-year-old technology used in mobile broadbands today. Kwicr states that the current Content Delivery Networks will never be able to solve the current problem with the performance of mobile broadbands, and launched a new type of network called Mobile Delivery Network. The MDN, aims to be the solution for the current CDNs’ numerous issues, such as contention, motion, interference from buildings and other different devices. Kwicr promises that with its new MDN network, the overall quality of media playback and content download will be quite better.
In the study, it is detailed how the average speed of mobile networks varies across countries with the United States’ speeds being rather underwhelming and on par with India, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea and Russia, all of which have been known for having terrible mobile network speeds revolving around 2Mbps. France and Singapore are both ahead of other countries with 3Mbps and 3.55Mbps respectively. According to Kwicr’s Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Hugh Kelly, the reason behind the US suffering from rather slow mobile network speeds can be acquainted to a close relation between the number of 4G LTE subscribers and the large geographical area that has to be covered. Kelly also noted how said users don’t really check the overall speed of the network they are using and only subscribe to it for the sake of using 4G technologies, giving other dubious countries about creating the necessary infrastructure for the network, a little tip that says “when you build it, they will come”.