[Q] BETTER LTE management on T-Mobile or any carrier.

Hey guys, I do not want faster LTE speeds, but better management to preserve as much as possible.

Here's the dilemma:

In a Family Plan on T-mobile in Florida US, with 5 people total, comes to roughly 140$ a month, unlimited talk, text, and 1G of LTE a month, and only 2G NONEXISTANT data speeds after the 1G of LTE (which we consume fast), even though we're not power users at all (maybe after 10 days we consume all of that 1G of LTE).


What would be better ways to disable and know of background services that consume data even though we're not browsing or using data at all?

One of the girls in the Family Plan has a Sprint HTC One, that I unlocked software wise, so she can't get LTE (no frequency match), so she -seems- to get the H (hspa?) symbol with a stable 4 to 8 Mb of downloads speeds that seem to consume her LTE limit slower than the rest.

Coud it be possible to get into a secret programming menu inside the Nexus 5 to disable LTE completely, and only use 3G speeds?
I remember having to disable LTE on another LG phone under MetroPCS, but only to save battery, and the 3G speeds were fine and stable.


How do you guys manage your LTE limits?


Btw, we get around 35Mb of download speed under LTE with T-Mobile, which is insane, but rather useless if the only data intensive task we use rarely is Youtube, and Youtube seems to load more than fine with just 4Mb of download speed.


Example: I wonder if dialing *#*#4636#*#*, and changing this to Evdo only, will only give me 3G speeds constantly?

simms22 said:

you share 1gb high speed data between 5ppl??? thats insane!!! i use about 1gb data per day(tmobole unlimited high speed data plan). id go crazy

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No my friend... everyone has 1G of LTE limit separately.

One person has a Sprint HTC One unlocked that can't run LTE because of the frequencies, so it only runs on H/3G, but has pretty good speeds and seems to waste that LTE slowly which is what we want.

I'm playing around with that programming menu and using GSM Auto seems to get rid of LTE and give me around 4Mb speeds under H/3G, which is good, but I wonder what are the best ways to manage that LTE limit

We have around 36Mb download speeds with LTE, but it's useless to be honest since Youtube works flawlessly with just around 4Mb stable. Same applies to other data intensive tasks.

We just want to disable or know of services that use our LTE in the background unnecessarily , so that we can disable them. Obviously we disable Location, and GPS when we don't use it, but I wonder if there are more advanced options.

The goal is to use less LTE to get the most out of it

Letitride said:

When my line was on VZW, I used 300 to 500 MB worth of data each month on old grandfathered 3G unlimited data plan. Now that we've switched to T-Mo's plan, DW used 100 to 200 MB worth of 4G data each month and I used 500 to 1.2GB worth of data each month (averaging about 750 MB) We are on Fios WiFi at home and at work/offices - whenever possible (and, if traveling - when hotel's WiFi is slow, we tried to balance it out) We only download attachments & update Apps (by default settings) when on WiFi - and turned off many Google Apps (if not uninstalled) including Google + and Photos & Auto Backups, as those can madly burn data.

Go thru each of your devices and see what's running in the background, Apps like Facebook are always pinging whereas push email don't necessary use a lot of data or bandwidth, nor does Twitter feeds. Turnoff some of those news/weather PUSH & photo/graphics pre-fetch, and you should see less data use in the background.

Look under Settings > Battery > to see the Apps that are running, and know how much data is being pulled - turn them OFF unless you & other users really need it. Google Now is cool but it's now OFF by default, switch on when needed - side effects included better & longer battery life.

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Very useful info guys, thanks!... maybe disabling LTE is not the best approach after all. I will keep researching on this.