I Updated My iPhone to Net10 & Straight Talk Carrier Update TFW 15.7 and Now My 4G Is Only 3G!

UPDATE: May 20 2015
You can no longer update the carrier profile. Current versions of iOS no longer support this feature

UPDATE: December 9 2014
I have created a guide that explains how to downgrade from TFW 15.7 to TFW 15.6. See How To Change Your iPhone’s Carrier from TFW 15.7 back to TFW 15.6 for Straight Talk and Net10 Customers If you decide to try it please leave a comment on that page and share how it went for you.

>UPDATE:

Don’t install the carrier update: Some iPhone 4 and 4s users are reporting real problems. Speeds slower than 3G. I’m not seeing it on my iPhone 5. Most of the time I have an LTE connection.

So yesterday I reported that I updated my iPhone 5 to carrier update TFW 15.7 and my phone was working fine. Today I am seeing a 3G network speed indicator in my status bar, when I used to see 4G. Readers are commenting that they are seeing this too.

I have an iPhone 5 and I have been getting LTE since October when I upgraded my Net10 & Straight Talk SIM cards. With TFW 15.6 my iPhone would indicate 4G when I made a phone call, went to voice mail, or a was sending / receiving an MMS. Otherwise most of the time, it shows LTE.

Now, my iPhone shows 3G where it used to be 4G in the cases I just mentioned.  If you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, your 4G is gone and you only have 3G. Don’t Panic.

Photo Dec 05, 4 35 02 PM What matters is the actual speed of your data connection, not the indicator on top.  The iPhone 4s supports HSPA+. This technology is technically just fast enough to label as 4G. Back in 2012, if you had an ATT iPhone 4s, your network speed indicator magically changed from 3G to 4G.  After 4G LTE became available for AT&T and Verizon, Apple didn’t have an LTE iPhone. Samsung and others did. This was a marketing problem for AT&T and Apple. The iPhone was their best selling smartphone and it didn’t use their fastest network available. The solution was to label HPSA+ as 4G. If I remember correctly, it was an AT&T carrier update that made this change

Not convinced? See Chris Zielger’s article over on The Verge,  iOS 5.1 shows ‘4G’ indicator in iPhone 4S status bar for AT&T

If you have ever used another type of smartphone, you’ll sometimes see a network indicator of H or 3.5G when the phone has a HSPA+ connection. I wish they would have just used H.

Photo Dec 05, 4 30 27 PM

 

So ask yourself, did my iPhone really get slower?Install Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test from the App Store and Run a test to see. Before I updated to LTE, I was getting between 2 to 4 Mbps up and 0.8 to 1.08 Mbps up.
What speeds are you getting? Leave a comment with your test results.

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