Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Scored nearly 800kbps on AT&T's 3G network w/ iPhone
- Thread starter protekt0r
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I live in a dinky little town just north of Sacramento and our 3g speeds here are 2mbps. It's funny that manhattan has incredibly slower speeds than a little town with less than 8000 people. I was surprised we even had 3g.
Actually, the real factors involved are:
1. Overall signal to noise ratio (often mislabeled "signal strength")
2. The type and amount of backhaul at the cell sites in your area, and how much data traffic they can accomodate
3. How congested the network is. How much on-air bandwidth is available as opposed to how many people are using the network. Voice users typically have priority over data users.
4. The 3G chipset in the phone itself.
So in many cases, it can make perfect sense that you'll get faster 3G speeds in a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it town as compared to a major metropolis. In the former case, you might well be the only person using data on a very lightly-loaded network., and so your phone is mostly free to use all the resources it can. In a large city, network usage can be nonstop most of the time, and that clogs up the network.
On the other hand, if that small town happens to get a half dozen iPhone users that all want to transfer data and make voice calls at the same time, then data could grind to a halt for everyone pretty quickly. This is because even though the 3G air interface itself has plenty of room and could handle many more users, the cell carrier might not've bothered to install fast enough data connections to handle more than 1 or 2 data users at once, thinking it would be a rare event. By contrast, in a major city it could take hundreds, thousands of users to make network throughput sink.
There's other things going on too. Theoretically, it's been shown that a cell phone on the move (say, highway speeds) might get slower data throughput than a cell phone that's stationary.
Lastly, the chipset is pretty obvious, seeing as we know the 3GS can download data faster than a previous generation 3G iPhone can.
A lot of people don't even consider the backhaul. I have a 7.6/2.0 device but as you can see below I've had poor speeds due to only having old copper backhaul in my town. Fortunately they're upgrading it to fibre by the end of the year so I should get much better speeds then
so you work at the avalon...you know whats wierd is that i live in Erie pa too..
hah i never thought i would meet anyone from my town on here..
So is 192 KB/sec (or 1.5 Mbps) AT&T's advertised average or advertised max? I'd imagine you meant advertised average. I often get close to 2.0 Mbps where I live. Also, given that the Phone 3G itself is capable of up to 3.6 Mbps (and 3G S up to 7.2 Mbps), I'd find it hard to believe AT&T would cap the download performance at 1.5 Mbps.
The 1.5 advertised is an average, you may get more, you may get less. There are multiple factors affecting your speed, such as the number of people on the tower, the tower's connection to the backbone network, distance from the tower, signal strength, interference from other devices, etc. Even the weather conditions can have an effect on wireless connections.
I suppose if you're standing directly beneath the cell tower and absolutely no one else is connected to the tower and using it, you may get close to 7.2 Mbps, but in the real world, it's highly unlikely.
For a wired broadband connection such as cable or DSL, it's quite easy for an ISP to quote a speed and promise you'll always have something reasonably close to it, but for wireless connections, there are so many more factors that are there that they can't quote speeds like that, hence, they just give an average.
