In each location, at the same exact spot, and within the same few minutes, I ran the Ookla speed test app at least five times on each iPhone, then averaged the results.
Both networks’ average download speeds were well above what’s recommended for viewing most videos by Netflix and YouTube. I want to stress that this was a limited, nontechnical test, with only about 42 readings overall. AT&T says it doesn’t have a promised speed range.
Those are 5-12 Mbps down and 2-5 Mbps up. Verizon’s overall average speeds were better than its modest publicly promised speeds, left unchanged since it rolled out its LTE network in 2010. And upload speeds are increasingly important, as people post videos and rich photos from their phones, and send business documents. It beat AT&T overall in upload speeds by more than 30 percent, at 7.8 Mbps versus 5.9 Mbps. The test results weren’t all bad news for Verizon. Verizon’s only win came in tests in and around my home base of Washington, D.C. This time, AT&T cleanly beat Verizon in four out of my five test locations: The Boston suburb of Medford, and three places in California - San Francisco, the Los Angeles Airport, and a resort hotel in Dana Point, between San Diego and LA. In all my years of doing these tests, AT&T had only topped Verizon once before, in November 2013, and that was because of a ridiculously fast performance at one single spot in New York City. Using identical iPhone 6 phones, and the popular Ookla Speed Test app, I found that AT&T averaged 15.89 megabits per second in download speed, and Verizon lagged with an average of 12.99 Mbps. My latest was a 12-day, five-city matchup last month, on both coasts, between the country’s two wireless giants, Verizon Wireless and AT&T.Īnd the winner was … AT&T, by a strong overall average of 22 percent. It does not store any personal data.So every once in a while I do an informal, unscientific cellular data speed test, focusing primarily on downstream speeds over LTE, the current standard for fast cellular data (also known as 4G). viewed_cookie_policy 11 months The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
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