I live in an LTE area with very bad network speed

I have a contract with vodacom for just over a month now. It's my first phone that can get an LTE signal but it's even worse than my previous phones' network speed. For instance, a 15mb application says it will take 3 hours to complete the download, that is if it can stay on the connection to complete the download. Is this how Vodacom treats their contract customers? Why is the network speed so slow? This is an LTE area after all!