In the fight for the title of best U.S. cellular carrier, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are constantly being put up against each other. An analytics firm by the name of Metrico Wireless Inc. compared the carriers to determine which one of the 3 major carriers had the fastest network and which one had the most reliable network.
What the firm did to perform the test was grab more than 21,000 web pages, 8,000 speed tests, and made over 6,000 voice calls from Apple’s iPhone 4S. The company used a proprietary measurement platform that they used to monitor and measure the performance of the carrier against each other. The sample size the company used was good therefore, the results are likely to be accurate.
According to the results, the fastest network in the comparison was AT&T. The wireless carrier had maximum download speeds of 6,047 Kbps and an average speed of 4,210 Kbps. For the same test, Verizon fell behind pretty quickly with a maximum download speed of 2,371 Kbps and an average of 1,071 Kbps. Sprint in this case was even slower than Verizon with a maximum speed of 1,767 Kbps and a mean speed of only 581 Kbps. In this case, the average download speed for AT&T was almost triple that of Verizons’ and roughly six time that of Sprint. Quite a big gap if you ask me.
Now when it comes to call reliability, Verizon had the fewest failed calls with only 2.1% To my surprise, AT&T was not too far behind with 2.8%. Sprint fell in last place once again with 3.7% of their calls dropping. The numbers are relatively low in total and another thing to take into consideration would probably be the location the phones were tested. I for one experienced a large number of dropped calls in New York City over the past few years, although I have to admit that it has gotten better recently.
Metrico also discovered that the iPhone 4S has an average dropped call rate of about 1.4%, which is poor when compared to other competing smartphones. However, when it comes to data task reliability, the iPhone 4S was almost at 100%, making it among the best in the world.
For those of you who have had experience or have heard from friends, how would you rank the three carriers? How did your experiences compare to the results Metrico found? Share your experiences and thoughts below!
Source: Metrico Wireless
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