The Power of 40 MBit/s LTE Roaming

I recently had one of those moments again when I realized that what I was able to do just then would have been impossible just a year ago. When I was recently able to download a massive 3 GB file over LTE I needed urgently at 40 Mbit/s while roaming abroad I realized that it was just such a moment.

It seems we are moving from a ‘near real time’ production to a we’ll deliver it while you are already working on it. It so happened when I was traveling abroad and urgently needed a software bundle to test abroad that had a size of 3 GB. Trains don’t wait and sure enough I was already abroad when the link to the freshly compiled software arrived from the developers on the other side of the planet. I would have been glad to download the image via the café’s Wi-Fi network but their downlink speeds were around 5 Mbit/s. That’s quite good enough for web surfing but not for downloading a 3 GB image in a reasonable amount of time. I could have tried a couple of other Wi-Fi hotspots by moving from place to place but I guess my chances of finding a sufficiently fast connection would have been slim at best.

Fortunately I didn’t have to try as I’ve just upgraded my mobile subscription to a 10 GB monthly data bucket that I can also consume when I’m roaming in the EU. LTE was fast and so was the interconnection link to my home network operator so I was able to download the file in 15 minutes at a data rate of 35 to 40 Mbit/s instead of trying an older software version and coming back a few days later. And that’s exactly what would have happened only a year ago.

Great stuff, I really like it when improvements come ins such recognizable chunks instead of being gradual and almost unnoticeable!