3g v 4g frequency

I live in the tiny town of Akron, Ohio. Probably never heard of it, as we are a small interbred band of people numbering 200,000. There are two main roads through town: Main and Market. Market is where we sell our crops and trade; but I digress.

In this tiny back water town of 200k, if you go farther than 1 mile from these two main roads, there is NO 4G from Sprint. But I notice if I get a half mile from a tower, my Sprint 3g phone pulls webpages faster than the 4g phones. (I carry both, a 4g and 3g phone, for cost and battery reasons.)

I suspect this is because 3G has the better, lower spectrum that carries farther (I was told by technical founder of Revol (who also rolled out Alltel), that this (lower spectrum) is one reason that Verizon does better than Sprint and Revol.). Thus possibly, in the real world, usually, 3G will be faster than 4G, though never at the 4G potential.

Would need someone with wave propagation experience to verify that 4G may be hype in the real world. I do find it fishy that Philips is providing 4G smart poles to augment 4g coverage.

Not knocking your test here or theory here at all. But there are tons of factors/variables that could play into this PRIOR to wave propagation.
It would be hard to accurately test this scenario and here is why I say this:
3G or 4G is likely broadcasting on a different antenna from a different tower. Or different antenna on same tower. What are those antenna heights? Are there other antenna broadcasting near by causing interferences?? One could have a higher quality coax, or antenna system? One could be broadcasting with more power than the other?
The antenna are typically omni-directional, however if you look at their radiation patterns, you will find they are always slightly directional. You could be in a area of strong radiation for the 3G and a weak one for the 4G?
Now thats just the transmitters. Next huge variable is the phone. Its receiver or antenna may actually be tuned better for 3G than 4G or vice versa. Software can play into this too. Basically you are carrying a transceiver in your pocket and the tower is your repeater. It seems to me there are huge variables to your 3G vs 4G conundrum prior to wave propagation.

Someone correct me if I am off here please.

Or one could download and install on your smart phone Carrier Compare and get real numbers.

I just ran the test with my iPhone 6s.

Verizon speed 735 KB/s response 64ms

nTelos speed 385 KB/s response 269 ms

AT&T speed 231 KB/s response 398 ms

Scratch that. The new improved version of Carrier Compare won't display the response times as the carriers bitched to Apple. Now you get green, yellow or red for signal strength and response.

Sometimes it's the phone.

I was on a 2 week camping trip with family, and there were multiples iphone 6s and galaxy 5 and 6.
While the galaxy is much faster, the 2 iPhone 6 which are identical, same plan, same everything. 1 had better reception and data. .
My guess is that like everything, not everything is made the same.

I could go on at great length about Sprint, but I won't.

First, cellular antennas are highly directional. The idea is to be able to use the same frequencies to serve users in different areas. A 16 antenna array can service 16 times the customers if properly set up. Your phone negotiates with the towers to figure out which antenna to talk to. Because they are directional, you can end up with long, narrow strips of coverage around main thoroughfares.

Second, not all cell towers talk to the same phones. Your 4G Sprint phone MAY be LTE or it may be Wimax. I used to get 2 to 8 MBPS on a wimax sprint phone. Then sprint decided to change to LTE and stopped expanding the Wimax towers. Those of us with a Wimax 4g in an area with towers got GREAT download speed. If you were 3 blocks out of the coverage area you got nothing and fell back to 2G (Very, Very slow).

The 3G phone is using an older protocol and has lower bandwidth but the antennas may be placed in a way that covers a broader area. The cell phone frequencies that we've standardized on are mostly line of sight. They also have limited range of a few miles up to 20 miles*. The old 800 Mhz analog phones had a range of many miles. I used to carry one when on the road in rural California since I was always within 50 miles of a cell tower. The two mile transmitters allow for lots of towers in cities and and thousands of customers per square mile. The 50 mile transmitters only handle a few thousand calls at a time, but over a very large area.

The frequency is not a feature of the transmission protocol. For maximum compatibility for most North American carriers 2G/3G/4G equipment that is minimum dual-band 800MHz Cellular or 1900MHz PCS is generally recommended. In many markets 4G data (LTE, WiMax) is on 700 MHz, 1700-2100 MHz, 1900MHz and 2500-2700 MHz). It's possible to get phones that cover the European bands as well.

The frequencies that a phone can use are dictated by the physical hardware. Antenna and amplifiers have to be tuned to the freq. Look at http://www.radio-electronics.com/in...ong-term-evolution/lte-frequency-spectrum.php to see what bands have been allocated. Your local carrier will have access to a small group of these bands. When I was working in that area, there were 7 bands allocated by the FCC for use as cell phones. It looks like there are more now.

Daniel