PCMag: Verizon has America’s fastest mobile network

All too often when someone asks which carrier is best they get a canned answer — “Verizon is the best”, “T-Mobile crawls in my area”, “Sprint is awesome in Manhattan”, “AT&T is the fastest” and so forth. While conventional wisdom is often based on truth, very few people actually speak about carrier speed and reliability based on empirical data that is backed up by any sort of systematic collection method. After all, switching carriers is both difficult and expensive, so doing it multiple times would be a herculean effort — and that’s just for one city.

Each year PCMag drives around the United States and actually tests which mobile networks are the fastest. Using custom software from Sensorly, a solid testing methodology, multiple phones, and whole lot of effort, they determine which mobile network is the fastest in each part of the continental US (well, for the most part – sorry Montanans).

The phones used in the 2012 test were all running Android 2.3 and ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 SoCs. The models included the Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Galaxy Note, LG Connect 4G, Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Samsung Galaxy S Blaze, and Motorola Razr Maxx. That group covered all the major carriers, some regional ones, and both 3G and 4G LTE.

The national winner for Fastest Mobile Networks 2012 was… Verizon’s 4G LTE network. It’s not only fast, almost more importantly, it’s available in many more cities than AT&T’s LTE network. And, as PCMag put it, “you can’t win if you don’t play.”
 
AT&T’s new, practically unpopulated LTE network took the crown in some cites, like Washington, DC, but no major regions: Verizon Wireless won all of those aside from the nationwide “Rural/Suburban” zones, where T-Mobile was the big winner. As noted before, AT&T was highly competitive, but their 4G LTE just doesn’t cover enough ground yet. Despite not having LTE, T-Mobile did rather well with their HSPA+ network.

So now, when someone asks you which network is the fastest you can tell them what you used to say, or you can do a few minutes of reading and tell them, without any question, who has the speed.
Read more at PCMag.com