3G/4G Performance Map: Data Speeds for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon

 

PCWorld - See our neighborhood-by-neighborhood test results for 127 locations in 13 cities. Click the map for raw speeds, as well as Web page and video load times. 

In our April 16 article "3G and 4G Wireless Speed Showdown," we reported the results of our exclusive 13-city tests of the four national wireless services: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Our study is the largest and best-known independent test of wireless service in the United States.

Here, in Part Two of our story, we drill deeper into the massive amounts of data that we collected over six weeks in February and March of this year. Whereas the first article reported the 13-city average speeds of the carriers, in this story we detail the carriers' performance in each of the ten testing locations we visited in each city.

We've assembled a full-page map showing all 127 of our testing locations in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. When you zoom in on a particular city, you'll see ten blue map markers--one for each place we tested. Click the pin, and you'll see our full testing results for that location.

T-Mobile's HSPA+ 21 service dominated the 3G testing, earning the highest marks for upload speed and download speed in 11 of the 13 cities we studied. The exceptions were Chicago (where AT&T captured the best download and upload speeds for 3G) and Dallas (where AT&T took the lead for 3G downloads, and Verizon won for 3G uploads).

 
Photograph by Robert Cardin


We saw three major patterns in our 4G test results. In five cities (Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), AT&T swept the 4G upload and download competitions; in four (Denver, New Orleans, San Jose, and Seattle), Verizon swept both; and in the remaining four (Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington, D.C.), AT&T won for downloads and Verizon prevailed for uploads. Notably, in two of the cities where Verizon ruled (Denver and Seattle), AT&T doesn't offer 4G LTE service.

Web Page and Video Load Times

 

In addition to the speed results, you can see the results of our "behavioral" tests, which are meant to closely approximate the wireless usage of real people. At each of our testing locations, our field researcher loaded a 100KB static Web page and viewed a 1-minute video while connected to each of the 3G and 4G services of the carriers. For each one, the researcher logged the time the Web page took to load, as well as the time necessary to stream the video.       More

 

New Mobile-Phone Privacy Law Proposed

Wired - Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) unveiled draft legislation Monday requiring mobile-phone carriers to reveal if they are employing tracking software such as Carrier IQ.
“Consumers have the right to know and to say ‘no’ to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,” Markey said in The Hill.

Under the Mobile Device Privacy Act (.pdf), consumers would have to consent that data from their phones would be sent to third parties, like Carrier IQ in Mountain View, California.
Carrier IQ has said that its software was secretly installed on some 150 million phones. It conceded that it has the capacity to log web usage, and to chronicle where and when and to what numbers calls and text messages were sent and received.

Carrier IQ said that the data it vacuums to its servers from handsets is vast — as the software also monitors app deployment, battery life, phone CPU output and data and cell-site connectivity, among other things. But, Carrier IQ said, it is not logging every keystroke, as a prominent critic suggested.          More

Beginner's Guide to Managing Mobile Movies

Are you wondering how to put your movie collection on your brand-new smartphone or tablet for some on-the-go video goodness? Read this collection of how-tos to find out how to rip your DVDs and Blu-ray movies, convert them in HandBrake, and sync your iTunes purchases.

 

PCWorld - Watching a movie at home on your TV or home theater PC is a simple affair: Insert the disc or open the file, and you’re ready to go. If you’re a new tablet or smartphone owner, however, taking your movie collection with you isn’t quite so easy. After all, you don’t have an optical drive handy for your tablet, and mobile devices often don’t play nicely with video files unless you use the appropriate file format and resolution. But we’ve prepared this collection of how-tos that will walk you through some of the more complicated steps involved in getting movies from your DVDs to your portable gadgets.

First, we’ll show you how to rip your DVD and Blu-ray movies to your PC using HandBrake and MakeMKV, respectively, so you can leave your optical drives behind. Both applications are free, and will make your movies look every bit as good on your PC as they do on the big screen.            More

Cell Phones: Why You Can't Hear Me Now

Cell phones cut off the highest-pitched ranges of our voices, making it hard for others to hear us. Corbis

THE GIST

-Our voices transmit information at frequencies much higher than scientists have long thought they could.

-Cell phones cut off the high-frequency sounds in our voices.

Discovery News - On a bus or in a bar, cell phone conversations can lead to major frustration. But it’s not just volume or poor reception that makes it so hard to hear the person on the other end of the line, according to a new study.

Cell phones also cut off the highest-pitched ranges of our voices. Those high-frequency sounds convey a surprising amount of information, according to the study.

NEWS: Your Brain Hears Silence

The results suggest that we may be missing the full meaning of what people say when we talk to them on our mobile devices.

“The prevailing thought was that, because high frequencies are not as loud in the voice, that the brain must not pay much attention to them,” said Brian Monson, a speech and hearing scientist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. “If the brain is paying that much attention to high frequencies, there must be some kind of perceptual information there.”

A typical male voice measures about 100 hertz and an average woman speaks at about 200 Hz. Unlike a monotonic sound like a whistle, voices also contain quieter overtones with frequencies that range as high as 20,000 Hz. But because most of the energy in our voices falls below 5,000 Hz, scientists have long assumed that those high-pitched sounds are irrelevant.

Monson, who is also a singer with experience as a sound engineer, started to suspect that assumption a few years ago. While working with other singers, he noticed that they improved the quality of their voices by making adjustments in very high frequency overtones. In a follow-up project, he found that people could detect tiny differences in the volume of high-frequency sounds – on the scale of just a few decibels.

For the new study, Monson recorded people speaking and singing the Star-Spangled Banner. He filtered the recordings to keep only sounds above 5,000 Hz. He played those recordings to about 50 people in a handful of experiments. Then, he asked listeners to try to identify details about what they heard.               More

T-Mobile Unveils New Unlimited Text, Data Plans

T-Mobile has introduced new plans intended to be more flexible to its customers' needs, a move that can be considered a sign of the company trying to maintain its value proposition in the midst of its proposed merger with AT&T.


All the plans, which debut July 24, require a two-year contract agreement for both new and existing customers. Users will be given a set of voice plan options that include unlimited texting and unlimited data. They will then be able to select a certain amount of high-speed data available in 2GB, 5GB, and 10GB increments.

They're just doing it differently

While AT&T and Verizon have done away with their unlimited plans, T-Mobile has not. Instead, it has chosen to throttle data throughput significantly after a set amount of bandwidth. With these new plans users will be able to control where this throttling begins.

This places the price of a plan with two lines with unlimited data and texting, and 2GB of data at $99.98 monthly ($49.99 per line). T-Mobile says that similar plans on AT&T would cost $199.99 with only 2GB of data, Sprint $209.98 with unlimited data, and Verizon $209.99 with a 2GB data cap.      More