Slow Cell Service? Switch to 3G

High population density can result in a bottleneck for your cellular device signal, but making one minor adjustment to your settings can get you back up and connected..

Originally published on millennialmoderator.com

Whether it’s a massive conference, a stadium sports event or a music festival, your cellular network service will only work as fast as the signal allows. This means the more people sending tweets, the less bandwidth is available for you and me. I was working at EDC Las Vegas 2019 this past year and with over 160,000 people all recording stories on their Instagram, my LTE network wasn’t able to send or receive texts, let alone get onto social media. So how does this happen and what can we do to get back up and browsing?

What’s the difference between LTE and 3G?

LTE, 4G, 3G (and the controversial 5G) are all standard languages of communication for cellular devices. I won’t get too deep into the technical stuff- mostly because I don’t want to sound like an idiot. This isn’t school and I’m not your teacher so here’s a Wikipedia article if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of how it all works. For the purposes of this Mod, all you need to know is that the G stands for generation and LTE stands for Long Term Evolution.

These standard languages for cellular communication consist of frequency bands, similar to that of radios. The main difference between LTE and 3G is that they each use different frequency bands, with LTE being the latest and most able to handle larger traffic and faster processing. Most mobile cellular devices today use LTE, however there’s an option to turn off LTE and switch back to previous, less effective generations of cellular communication. Now why would you want to do that?

When you’re attending a heavily populated event like a concert or conference, the LTE cellular frequency bands are under immense processing strain, as thousands of users are transmitting data to and from their devices. Filming and…