PCWorld has done its yearly testing of US wireless carriers to find out which company provides the fastest service across the country and T-Mobile and AT&T took the top honors this year in 3G and 4G speed respectively. The tests were done in 13 different cities from 10 locations in each city. The only variation was that AT&T's 4G was only tested in 11 cities, because there was no LTE coverage in Denver or Seattle yet, and Sprint was only tested in 12 cities because there's no WiMAX in New Orleans.
So, on the 4G side of the board, it was a battle between AT&T and Verizon's LTE networks against T-Mobile's HSPA+ and Sprint's WiMAX service. Sprint came in dead last, putting up 4G numbers that were actually slower on average than T-Mobile's 3G service. T-Mobile was respectable with HSPA+ speeds of 5.5Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up. But, ultimately AT&T's LTE took top honors with 9.12Mbps down across its 11 cities, compared to Verizon's 7.35Mbps average in 13 cities. Verizon did beat out AT&T in upload speed though, with 5.86Mbps compared to AT&T's 4.91Mbps.
The 3G tests were all T-Mobile though with an average of 3.84Mbps down and 1.44Mbps up. AT&T is the only carrier that deserves any mention here with 2.62Mbps down, both Sprint and Verizon were just embarrassingly slow. On the whole though, the numbers do say that 3G speeds are faster than last year almost across the board, only Sprint's speeds went down compared to last year.
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