Verizon 4G XLTE

[prosheditor]

The wireless carriers have been pushing 4G LTE, Long Term Evolution, technology for a while now. Verizon is now promoting XLTE claiming transfer speeds twice as fast as LTE. They said it was 5 - 10 or 12 Mbps DOWN and 2Mbps UP which doesn't sound much different than LTE's specs when it was rolled out. They also said that their New York market was getting three times LTE speeds. Hopefully XLTE is backwards compatible with existing devices and not another forced upgrade requirement. Is anybody currently using XLTE for personal use, LIVE backpacks, PC FTP or streaming for internet liveshots? If so, is it really that much faster? Thanks

 

[The Thing on The Sticks]

The problem is as with anything what do they mean by faster. We work in an industry where unfortunately we require the opposite of others when it comes to web speed. Upload is more important when trying to ftp footage to a client or station at the last minute and I could care less about the down lode.

The problem is for most people it is the opposite so while the pipe might be able to handle a total of 14 Mbps in most cases it will be stacked in a way that the majority of it is down with very little up. I wish there was a way to choose or scale the up vs down but as far as I know it generally doesn't exist, so we are stuck with wasted bandwidth.

 

[Run&Gun]

Good point, Geoff. I have Roadrunner(TWC) and I'm thinking about upgrading from my standard service to their Ultimate plan which is, depending on your market, 50-100 megs down, BUT only 5 UP. 1/10th to 1/20th of the download speed. My current upload speed peaks around 1mbps and is in reality in the kbps when Ive actually had to FTP stuff. Even just a few mins of footage can take forever. On the flip side, I've been in some places where we were given access to their private network and could FTP in what amounted to real time(@ h.264 720P).

 

[The Thing on The Sticks]

You might be able to negotiate something beefier for an upstream pipe, I seem to recall having heard of it but couldn't say I have done so myself.

 

[tvnews]

The wireless carriers have been pushing 4G LTE, Long Term Evolution, technology for a while now. Verizon is now promoting XLTE claiming transfer speeds twice as fast as LTE. They said it was 5 - 10 or 12 Mbps DOWN and 2Mbps UP which doesn't sound much different than LTE's specs when it was rolled out. They also said that their New York market was getting three times LTE speeds. Hopefully XLTE is backwards compatible with existing devices and not another forced upgrade requirement. Is anybody currently using XLTE for personal use, LIVE backpacks, PC FTP or streaming for internet liveshots? If so, is it really that much faster? Thanks

Yes, Verizon has become super quick on the upload side. I'm located in New Jersey. After Hurricane Sandy caused so much damage here I started to see when I went into the most damaged areas along the jersey shore I got extremely fast uploads. I remember stoping at the Asbury Service area to FTP tape in. I was used to the usb stick taking up to10 mins to send a couple mins of Broll. That night I started the upload and I got an immediate message "under a minuet". I looked at the file and it was almost 200 Megs. I assumed I had some type of a bad connection and I sent it again. And again it was under a minuet.

I just did a test using speedtest.net. I tested with 4 sites in New York. The test came back with downloads between 20 and 28 megs and uploads between 10 and 11 megs. Up until a couple of years ago I know my uploads would be around 1.1, 1.2, or maybe 1.3. I also just did the same test with my att usb stick and the fastest I got upload was 1.5 megs.

So with no change in hardware or no additional charges I am getting about 10 times the uploads speed.


Btw I think Verizon was faced with a major job of replacing copper and fiber on the poles after Sandy and opted to quickly upgrade the towers so as to continue servicing home customers by moving them over to cellular customers.

 

[ENG FTP]

Another thing to consider to increase your upload speeds is to bond Verizon and ATT or T-Mobile SIMS with something like a Pepwave device. Very similar to what LiveU does at much less costs and commitment. You need to have a bonding solution that puts all the data packets back in order and this can now be done in the "Cloud". I had success using AWS for that.

 

[ENG FTP]

One more thing.

H.264 AKA AVC is slowly being replaced by H.265 HEVC which will have a 50% compression savings. H.265 HEVC has been adopted and everyone one is waiting for vendor support and vendors are waiting for demand. With 4K AKA Ultra HD it will happen soon enough. Face Time on some iPhones are already using it.

So my free advice consider bonding cells for faster upload and watch for HEVC to produce video files smaller in size. The days of it taking "forever to FTP" are over.

 

[The Thing on The Sticks]

One more thing.

H.264 AKA AVC is slowly being replaced by H.265 HEVC which will have a 50% compression savings. H.265 HEVC has been adopted and everyone one is waiting for vendor support and vendors are waiting for demand. With 4K AKA Ultra HD it will happen soon enough. Face Time on some iPhones are already using it.

So my free advice consider bonding cells for faster upload and watch for HEVC to produce video files smaller in size. The days of it taking "forever to FTP" are over.

which is great if you are delivering finished edited content. But sometimes you need to deliver raw unedited footage which brings it back around to the discussion of pipe size. Does anybody in the know have any idea if/when we might see a 5G version of wireless roll out.

 

[ENG FTP]

If pipe is your problem, bonding is your answer.

 

[canuckcam]

which is great if you are delivering finished edited content. But sometimes you need to deliver raw unedited footage which brings it back around to the discussion of pipe size. Does anybody in the know have any idea if/when we might see a 5G version of wireless roll out.

Streambox, Dejero, Live U, Teradek, etc.?

<rant>
We're technically not even at 4G yet but marketing has determined otherwise. We're in 3.5G. Heck we don't even have LTE fully implemented yet in North America, we're on a version of LTE designed for incremental upgrading and compatibliity with old cellular equipment. And we're on the slower FD-LTE standard too. There's slightly faster TD-LTE, then there's actual 4G called LTE-Advanced with 3Gbps performance.
</rant>