2013 U.S. Wireless Network Tests: AT&T Fastest, Verizon Most Reliable

adeelarshad82 writes "For the fourth year running, PCMag sent drivers out on U.S. roads to test the nation's Fastest Mobile Networks. Using eight identical Samsung phones, the drivers tested out eight separate networks for four major carriers across 30 cities evenly spread across six regions. Using Sensorly's 2013 software, a broad suite of tests were conducted every three minutes: a 'ping' to test network latency, multi-threaded HTTP upload and download tests including separate 'time to first byte' measures, a 4MB single-threaded file download, a 2MB single-threaded file upload, the download of a 1MB Web page with 70 elements, and 100kbps and 500kbps UDP streams designed to simulate streaming media. Nearly 90,000 data cycles later, the data not only revealed the fastest networks (AT&T) and the most consistent (Verizon), but also other interesting points. The tests recorded the fastest download speed (66.11 Mbits/sec) in New Orleans and the best average in Austin (27.25 Mbits/sec), both for AT&T's LTE network. The tests also found T-Mobile's HSPA network to have the worst Average-Time-To-First-Byte, even when compared with AT&T HSPA network. Also according to the tests, Sprint's LTE network didn't even come close to competing with other LTE networks, to the point that in some cities its LTE network speed averaged less than T-Mobile's HSPA network speed."

Comments

What is boils down to:

[mu51c10rd]

AT&T - Fastest
Verizon - Reliable
TMobile - Cheapest
Sprint - Service

bad time to be testing this

[Tumbleweed]

T-Mobile's LTE roll-out is about to get serious, and they claim they'll have around 200 million people in the U.S. covered by the end of the year (with rumors of my beloved Seattle area getting it by the end of this month). Sprint's LTE roll-out is also chugging along.

The landscape will look very different by year's end.

Re:Sprint people are good, service is awful here

[Isca]

Expect Sprint to get a lot better very soon.

On June 30th the nextel iDen network will be shut down. This operates in 5 mhz chunks in the lower half of the 800mhz range nationwide. In many rural areas they have already transitioned most of their services to the same range and have kept 2 chunks of frequencies in the 800mhz range for iden customers but in urban areas they still had a Million customers on iden as of May 1 and they can't convert any part of those frequencies over. Especially in DC with all kinds of government contracts.

Once these are shut down they can start freeing using that bandwidth for LTE or CDMA. In most areas of the country they have already preconfigured equipment to use the new frequencies after this shutdown happens and will be enabling this with just a software load on the new equipment.