@michaelhess4825
I was a part of this, engineering and building fiber backhaul to support the cell carriers. It was wild going from towers with a few T1’s to, sometimes,10Gb redundant fiber. Average was 1GB to each cell, again, redundant. CWDM, and DWDM, were instrumental to get the necessary bandwidth aggregated to the various CO’s and PoP’s. Had a fun call with some Japanese engineers at Fujitsu, as I’d unknowingly found an issue with their flashwave platform, where literal free radicals were randomly hitting and disabling portions of circuits knocking out 10Gb channels within their 100Gb controllers.
@paulbort6371
I was kind of surprised you omitted the mess that was VoLTE, where the first 4G phones were 4G only for data, and still used 3G for voice, because the 4G standard (AIUI) did not yet have an accepted way to do voice. It was all fine until telecoms started shutting down 3G networks, and people found out their "4G" device was about to stop working. Maybe a future topic?
@NBEnjoyer-d6s
The old YouTube app Icon singlehandedly gave me a mid 20s crisis
@FlightMate
HSDPA was the most visible difference for me. Using the internet on mobile went from "subpar" to "very good" overnight.
@cv990a4
I had a phone that had 4G hardware but was only certificated for 3G - the Google Nexus 4 (if I recall correctly). So of course, Android being an open OS, some people got to work and released an unofficial version of the Android that (illegally) activated the 4G radios on the phone. I am far from a hacker, but this motivated me to download that version on my phone - and it worked. So my first year or two of 4G was this illegal rogue version Android running on the Google Nexus 4. I guess the FCC would not be happy with me, but it was great to suddenly have a much faster data experience on my existing phone.
@petercozzaglio6070
As a truck driver, I much preferred 4G LTE. I had a more reliable connectivity when in rural areas. When I’m in a big city, 5G is blazing fast. In Salt Lake City, Utah, I can get speeds close to 100mb download speeds.
@Le3eFrereBrunet
Working for a Canadian carrier can tell you data consumption doubled more than 2x a year in the early iPhone days, every 6 months we’d have to perform refarming, converting 3G into LTE. It was only by the very late 2010’s we got close to doubling data volumes every 10 months. 5G is also causing a good increase in data volumes.
@Le3eFrereBrunet
Also after HSPA ~ 8-14 Mbps, as you said there was HSPA+ with ~ 14 - 22 Mbps, there was a final boost with DC-HSPA, Dual-Cell, where you could use 2 cells or frequencies on the same base band radio to achieve double of HSPA+, though typically you would be near 40Mbps.
@forgetittube5882
Well, what really allowed LTE to succeed are those SAW/BAW (surface acoustic wave /bulk acoustic wave) filters. Before them you needed a local IF oscillator for each band (and therefore you had those dual/triple band phones) with SAW/BAW devices, finally, you could have a single IF circuit for all bands, and LTE has a ton of bands (which reminds me, the first LTE iPhone, I think iPhone 5 or 5s…was region specific… they couldn’t manage all, over 100, base band frequencies)
@Alozhatos
I still remember in 90s and 2000s you cannot roaming in Japan and South Korea on Nokia phones.
@cosmic_drew
The photo at 4:47 scared the shit out of me. I have a photo I took at the EXACT same spot in Austin, TX with almost the exact same amount of people. I thought somehow my photo got leaked out somewhere. Not that is really matters for a photo of 6th St., but it looks so similar it's crazy.
@scottparker1741
Awesome video as always, the nostalgia of that old YouTube app icon brought back was palpable
@AlmostRandomPasserby
Great video! Voice implementation over LTE was only thing that did not work out so great in LTE. VoLTE was not part of the initial LTE standard release and support was added later. It uses IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) to glue everything together ... in way so dynamic nothing interoperates easily ... or at all. It works well enough after 10+ years of work except for roaming while abroad. Look up IMS architecture or VoLTE call flow diagram for the stuff of nightmares. 😉 I do not know the story well enough to tell it right but there were originally two proposed solution VoLTE and VoLGA.
@LEGIOXIIIG
I love your channel. Always well researched. One small correction: EVDO in the business was always refered to as "EVEE DEE OH" if that makes sense.
@pete3897
It's Encapsulated PostScript to me! :)
@ozbolli
“Long Term Evolution”. Love it. 1:18 UMTS was the collective term in Western European markets c2003-
@sen_ex
Excellent video & deep dive into the history of LTE. Reminded me of my network class in uni. Keep it up
@thavionhawkmkii4509
I remember leaving T-Mobile for Sprint trading my Blackberry Pearl Flip for a Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch. Yes that is in fact the full title they gave to their CDMA/WiMAX version of the Galaxy S2. When I had it, I could get as high as 16mb down. By the time I upgraded to an S4, WiMAX was DEAD and Sprint was well into the transition to LTE.
@SchioAlves
It was meant to simplify the split between data and voice/text and in the end created a different complication that has not been resolved till this day: voice over LTE is a mess and too dependent on the carrier, so worldwide you can still have a 4G (or 5G) phone that drops you into 3G for calls because of incompatibility.
@DX4AB1OF