I have been comparing my Rezound and Nexus extensively for the past week as I need to give one up, and keep the other. Having some issues with signal on the Nexus. Here is my question:
If both are showing a signal strength within .03 dBm give or take
Are you comparing the 3G dBm (with the nexus set to CDMA only and not CDMA/LTE)? If not, you are comparing apples and oranges. Gingerbread displays only the 3G/CDMA signal dBm, not the LTE signal. Just an FYI, in case you've missed it in other threads.
, and the Nexus consistently outperforms my Rezound in speed tests
I observed this myself in the VZW corporate store in Folsom, CA. It was getting faster results on the Nexus repeatably compared to the Rezound.
.....why is it that watching video, youtube, streaming music, etc is seemless on my Rezound but causes repeated buffering on my Nexus (3rd Nexus I have tried).
Hard to say without detailed information (such as a packet capture, which might be possible if you're rooted and there is a tcpdump binary or busybox supports tcpdump). My
guess is that while the throughput on the nexus is faster when the signal is good, when the signal drops off, it causes the connection to go into tcp slow start (a tcp congestion control algorithm). In layman's terms, what tcp slow start does is SLOWLY increase the tcp receive window size to ramp a connection back up after some packet loss. This sounds very likely in this case. What
could be happening is that the connection is going along very fast, but then the signal degrades and the transport stream drops off a lot or completely. The TCP congestion controls kick in and the TCP receive window is dropped significantly and the TCP stack slowly increases the window over time to avoid opening the floodgate too soon and causing additional packet loss.
If there are any folks here who have a rooted nexus and are willing to capture a trace during a problematic youtube session, I'd be willing to analyze it in wireshark (and I'm sure some of the better network admin types than I would be happy to look).
So that's just my guess...without seeing what's going on behind the scenes, it's hard to say. Does the nexus have issues on youtube when connected over wifi? What about 3G?
*edit* fixed the tail end of my quote that was still there from the OP's post.
