Blame Politics for the US’ Embarrassingly Slow LTE

The US lagging behind the rest of the world in LTE is not a particularly new phenomenon. The gap is, though, getting starkly worse. “A year ago, an average 4G speed of 20 Mbps would have been a truly impressive feat,” says an OpenSignal report, “but today there are 15 countries and 52 individual networks that meet or exceed that mark.” There’s been a slosh of improvement stateside as well; US speeds averaged out at just 7Mbps in 2015. That puts us on pace to catch up with the most world’s most capable carriers sometime late in the next decade.

Thanks to a cluster of technological and political hurdles, it might just take that long. The last time a major chunk of spectrum became available in the United States, though, was in 2008, just a year after the first iPhone was released. In cellular terms, it may as well be the Mesozoic Era. The Federal Communications Commission has penciled in another spectrum auction for sometime this year, but OpenSignal’s Kevin Fitchard cautions against getting one’s hopes up. “The FCC has delayed it many times. It’s a really complicated thing,” he says. “Unlike other auctions in which they basically take frequencies that have been cleared out from the defense department, or satellite spectrum, something like that, the spectrum that they’re talking about now is being used by TV broadcasters.”