Eight Major 3G & 4G Networks Tested Nationwide

adeelarshad82 writes "Building on last year's efforts, PCMag once again hit the road on a 6,000 mile trip to test out eight 3G and 4G networks to determine which ones were the fastest (and slowest) in 21 different cities. With 10 stops in each city for at least 15 minutes each, the team used custom speed test software on 16 different handsets which ran HTTP upload and download tests every 25 seconds to 3 minutes. The test results were broken down by city as well as region. As expected, Verizon's 4G led the pack. It performed the best in Dallas, where it averaged 15.75 Mbsp and also hit the highest download speed of 37.66 Mbsp. On the other hand, Sprint's 4G results were disappointing; in some cities even AT&T provided better download speeds. Beyond the 4G, T-Mobile's HSPA+ offered blazing fast speeds as well, going as high up as 15.93 Mbsp in Detroit while averaging the best in Dallas at 6.44 Mbps. Amongst the 3G networks, AT&T mostly outperformed all others."

Because ITU-T was stupid with it

[Sycraft-fu]

These new standards like LTE are much, MUCH faster than existing 3G standards. So it makes sense for them to be called something new for marketing sake and for consumer understanding. However ITU-T decided that to be "4G" you had to be much faster than could currently be done.

Well the companies decided to just ignore that, and call the current stuff 4G and I don't blame them at all. I mean with LTE on Verizion you are talking a new frequency band, new encoding, much faster speeds, and you don't want to call that a new generation of wireless?

Standards organizations need to be reasonable with what can be met. Nobody is saying that the current wireless technologies are where we should stop but they are what we can deliver NOW and they are a big step up. Targets shouldn't be set so far advanced. Set that for 5G, or whatever.

Re:Barely Touched the West Coast

[saschasegan]

Nah, we just had to plot out a trip that took no more than 22 days, where both cars started in Detroit (that's where we got the cars) and covered the maximum amount of large cities, where each city had as many 3G/4G choices as possible, and with no more than about 350 miles of driving per day. It was gated by things like car availability and publication deadlines.

Re:Quickly lets do a test for HANDHELDS ONLY

[saschasegan]

No, it's because ... 1) Last year we used USB dongles and it was a bit of an operational nightmare. The drivers kept conflicting and we had to rebuild the laptops a few times, Windows would freak out from time to time for no apparent reason, the tests all had to be initiated by hand, and there are differences in USB dongle performance anyway so it doesn't totally insulate you against that. 2) Last year I got a lot of criticism around "who uses USB dongles? Everybody's on smartphones!" ... so I thought we'd use those popular smartphone devices. I tried to make the devices as similar as possible. 3) Sensorly was willing to work with us to create a great field test app that I think tested a bunch of connectivity aspects really wekk.