> [1] My first smartphone was the HTC Thunderbolt. No one, not even me, will speak of that thing with nostalgia. It was pretty cool owning one of the first LTE devices on the market, though. There was no contention at all in areas with LTE service and I was getting 75+Mbps mobile tethering in 2011. Then everyone else had LTE too and the good times ended.
I also had the HTC Thunderbolt and remember getting ~75Mbps initially. My wife's family lived way out in the countryside in Illinois and had something like 2Mbps DSL internet. But on one visit, I realized that if I walked down the road a short distance to the top of a hill where I had line of sight to what turned out to be a Verizon tower, I could still get ~75Mbps! I took advantage of that once or twice to get things downloaded in a more reasonable amount of time.