Smartphones

BrutulTM_sl said:

Just let go.

Click to expand...

And sell it to one of the remaining idiots for a tidy profit.

Or put your music library on your phone.

Just switch to a competitor, brutal, that the Federal Court ensures exists.

I've been poking around some more and I think I found the explanation to my problems. Let me go a bit in depth since I understand it better.

I've been getting delays on my push notifications, high pings, and kinda crappy data rates. I originally attributed this to the Nexus 5's cell radio and not ST wireless ATT(I received both at the sametime) since I researched this somewhat beforehand and thought I would see something like this reported. I guess most people don't care about these types problem? IDK, I don't use my data connection that much, which is why I tolerate the horrible 3G VZW service where I live. But delayed push notifications is a deal breaker. That's one of the primary benefits of a smartphone, letting you know shit so you don't have to check it.

Apparently, ST Wireless is REALLY aggressive with closing inactive connections. As in, the ones that need to stay open for push notification to work. In case you didn't know, push notification works by having either your cell phone(on cellular data) or you router leave a connection open is that when a pushed message comes around for your cell phone's IP, it will go through right away. No open connection, it sits there until the connection is reestablished. Which, for everything that uses Google's push service, is every 28 minutes. That essentially destroys the functionality of push. People have found workarounds for this by basically reopening the connection every X minutes, but that can't be good for your battery otherwise Google would have set it there to begin with. And your push can still be delayed up to the max of whatever X minutes. AND it doesn't fix Exchange pushes, which obviously use a different service and likely can't be easily fixed since each implementation is done per business(I'm wildly guessing here).

Second problem is that ST Wireless customers are basically second rate users. Now, this I did know, but I didn't expect how it would manifest. I honestly thought it would just mean a shitty data throughput. I can live with that, I already deal with a VZW 3G that's horrid. This is worse. Pings in the hundreds of milliseconds combined with a reduced throughput will reduce said throughput even more and make even simple mobile page loads REALLY slow. 3-4 bars of HSPA+, I would get ~250ms ping and under 1/1 up/down on speedtests. I've even seen it rumored that ST wireless reroutes ALL data to some servers in AZ, which does explain the pings. What, no LTE speedtests? This is the other aspect of second rate customer I didn't expect. I've seen my phone connect to LTE all of 2 times and both times it was fleeting and 0-1 bars. I've seen ATT's map for my area, I had to move the map 45 miles away just to get some gradient and establish I was actually looking at 4G LTE color. Ithaca is covered in LTE. I'm not even sure how this is managed. ST Wireless customers just not allowed to connect to certain towers? How do they manage to restrict the LTE signal in such a way? How aside, situation sucks.

I know a few other people use ST Wireless here, I'm wondering if you've had the same problems on ATT? Waste of $55 but whatever, that was the whole point of trying it out first. I'm looking into AIO Wireless or ATT Go Phone. Both are prepaid, but ATT owns both. I know AIO is capped at 8 down, but that's more than fast enough for me. Anyone here use either of those services. Can you report if you've had any of the aforementioned problems? How does the service compare to postpaid ATT?

If you're streaming frequently, yes, that will keep the google port open. Won't help exchange though, do you use that?

I don't think anyone else has much of a LTE network in Ithaca. I know TMO's network is shit around here, it certainly wouldn't account for the gaps I'm experiencing. Who else would have LTE towers up that ATT could roam onto? Your ping could be better, but I'd love if I could even get a stable HSPA+ connection at that speed. HSPA+ is rare and LTE is even rarer.

Any idea where I could go that has a compendium of APNs? From what I've seen so far, this is akin to voodoo. Might as well get my palm read to see if that will improve my speeds.


BTW, looks like pretty much all of saratoga is covered in LTE.

Edited after you responded. You should check the map again. All of Saratoga has LTE.

Yeah, I've seen that thread on XDA, tried most of them. Some of the just don't work at all. There seems to be a difference between their HSPA+ SIMs and LTE SIMs in regards to what APNs you can use and how well you can work. Might even be affecting the push delay. I'd be willing to use HSPA+ only if it meant I could get those speeds and no delay.

I'm guessing you tested the delay for me? Can you do it a half hour after disconnecting from wifi with no streaming or anything? Default refresher for google services is 28 minutes.