AT&T Tops PCWorld 3G Wireless Performance Test

AT&T has topped PCWorld's 3G Wireless Performance Test with download speeds 67 percent faster than its competitors.

The test looked at 13 popular cities and compared the networks from 20 locations situated in a grid over the center of the city. PCWorld performed more than 51,000 tests in December and January.

A reliability score was assigned to each test. If an uninterrupted connection was established at a reasonable speed at 19 out of 20 testing locations for a given network, that network would have achieved a reliability score of 95 percent for that city.


"Our most recent tests showed that the connection speeds delivered by AT&T's network--both downloads and uploads--increased considerably in every one of our test cities, compared with the speeds it registered in identical tests we conducted last spring. In Baltimore, New York City, New Orleans, Portland, and Seattle, AT&T’s average download speeds in our tests more than doubled. The network’s 13-city average download speed was 1.4 mbps; that’s as fast as many home broadband connections. In our tests, none of AT&T’s three biggest competitors registered average download speeds of better than 1 mbps.

In our Baltimore, Boston, and New York tests, AT&T’s HSPA network delivered burst speeds exceeding 4000 kbps--a top speed that Sprint and Verizon can’t match with their current 3G technology, CDMA EvDO Rev. A."

You can take a look at the result charts below or hit the link for a very detailed analysis of how each network performed.

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