Hi Everyone, wondering if anyone has any ideas on this:

I'm finding myself having much slower than expected speeds around Christchurch in the Mandeville St area in Riccarton (think around Red Bowl restaurant). This would be pretty typical for me at my desk at work in this area: https://www.speedtest.net/android/427895013.png around 500kbps down and 50kbps up with 200ms+ ping. Around 30% of the speedtest runs freeze up or error out with "network communication issues" Loading web pages can sometimes freeze for over a minute to load a typical forum page. YouTube or downloads (trying out Google music streaming now available in NZ for instance) can take forever, often timing out and having to restart multiple times. Often the connection seems to 'drop' for 30-60 seconds then load OK once it 'recovers'.

The thing is, according to the 2degrees coverage map, this area is actually considered "maximum coverage"  http://www.2degreesmobile.co.nz/mobilebroadband/broadbandzones  I have this issue with both 'normal' 500MB data from the $19 pre-paid plan, and with the 12GB broadband data pack.

This is on a new Nexus 4 phone on the 2degrees network, and given that 2degrees officially carry this phone, I honestly expected a lot faster speeds. I've read other posts on Geekzone ( http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=40&topicid=113735 ) where people were getting ~20Mb/s on 2degrees in Dunedin and on Vodafone. Certainly I do seem to get better speeds in the more central areas of Riccarton by the mall and other areas of town, but only at best 5-10Mb/s certainly nowhere near 20. Browsing is noticeably better in those areas.

The phone usually reports being in HSPA:10 with about 2-4 bars (-97 dBm) signal strength in H or H+ in the data bars. I've seen it fluctuate between H, H+, GPRS, 3G and sometimes gets stuck in Edge for minutes at a time with essentially no data at all. The APN settings are as per the 2Degrees website and as was loaded on the sim. My old Galaxy nexus still had slow speeds in this area, but seemed to stutter and drop a lot less so wasn't anywhere near as frustrating to use. In other areas it's always H or H+ but the signal strength doesn't seems to directly affect the speeds I get.

So I'm wondering, if it's just this area, did we get the short end of the stick here in Christchurch? Is the area over capacity now that quite a few business have relocated here post earthquake? Or is it possible I'm in the wrong data pool or something like I've heard sometimes happens in the US and should talk to 2degrees? e.g http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2034841

Unfortunately I don't have any other micro Sim to test with another network and haven't tested in any other major City. However on other phones on the XT network there does not seem to be any issue in this area.

Sorry for the long post, tried to put as much detail as I could in. Any help or suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance.