[mschuster91]

Most of the cheap plans are prepaid or resellers, which often enough don't give LTE or limit the speed. Or they're using the O2 network which you can't really use for anything that demands bandwidth or performance or if you need good countrywide coverage.

Also, all non-first-class customers (i.e. everyone except direct contract customers of the three telcos) get lower priority on the network, both for calls and data.

[MarkCole]

Most of the cheap plans are prepaid or resellers but those that advertise LTE really do give LATE in my experience.

The O2 network here is terrible for 4G I agree the other two are much better.

Is the lower priority actually noticeable though? Like have their been any third party tests? I'd never heard that until today but it does make sense I guess. They want their own traffic to come first.

[mschuster91]

> Most of the cheap plans are prepaid or resellers but those that advertise LTE really do give LATE in my experience.

The question is, which level of LTE? If it's capped at anything between 10-15 MBit/s there will be no advantage over HSDPA, versus the 150+ MBit/s you can get via proper LTE.

> The O2 network here is terrible for 4G I agree the other two are much better.

Yeah, but markedly more expensive.

> Is the lower priority actually noticeable though?

Go to any bigger event, say a huge anti-nazi rally, Oktoberfest or rock festivals. I was in Cologne a couple of weeks, approximately 20k people attended. My LTE tablet (O2) had no internet at all. My business phone (Vodafone) had proper internet access, and my private cellphone (Lebara, using Telekom network which is inarguably the best) had massive issues.