Eight Major 3G & 4G Networks Tested Nationwide 123
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."
Cue the Inevitable threads... (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is bunk. In [Insert City], [carrier A] sucks donkey balls. [Carrier B] is much better!"
"Are you joking? [Carrier B] STINKS here in [City C]. I love [Carrier A]! "
"I wish I could just buy a phone that makes calls!"
This is actually important to test (Score:4, Insightful)
When Verizon markets their network as "4G", I expect it to blow away other 3G networks. It's good that it does, and it's also good for PCMag to verify that it does. As a counterexample, Sprint's 4G network wasn't really much faster than AT&T's 3G network.
Re:Verizon's LTE speeds (Score:4, Insightful)
True. Latency be damned, when it downloads its fast.
But what I found interesting in the charts is that they more or vindicated AT&T as far from the worst carrier, and
usually second only to T-Mobile in the 3G arena. From the grouse level on the web you would be lead to believe that
AT&T were the slowest and offered no connectivity at all in most place.
With an independent assessment, will any of these carriers change their advertising to avoid false advertising claims.