No it doesn't matter because it makes no difference to the end user experience. I also took the liberty of cutting out all the waffle from your comment, I hope you don't mind.
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Study Suggests Samsung Users In U.S. See Faster Download Speeds Than Apple iPhone Users on Average
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No it doesn't matter because it makes no difference to the end user experience. I also took the liberty of cutting out all the waffle from your comment, I hope you don't mind.
I can hear my old college Statistics professor now: "Correlation is not causation."
It could be one of any number of reasons, including geography (cities are faster than rural), network, usage conditions, etc., and I can easily believe iPhones may not be evenly distributed among these variables.
Sure, it could be that iPhone modems are the cause, but without a better dataset there's no way to know.
It could be one of any number of reasons, including geography (cities are faster than rural), network, usage conditions, etc., and I can easily believe iPhones may not be evenly distributed among these variables.
Sure, it could be that iPhone modems are the cause, but without a better dataset there's no way to know.
I'm always shocked to see how ridiculously expensive mobile services are in the USA. 80 dollars per month? 90 dollars per month? WHAT?!
I pay 25 euros ($28) per month for unlimited phone calls, unlimited texts and virtually unlimited 4G data. The only 'limit' I have on my data is that I can use 5GB per day, before it stops (to prevent misuse) but I can reactivate another GB by one click on a button in my carrier's app for free. If that gigabyte runs out I can get another one by repeating that, and another one, and another one..
So basically it is unlimited 4G. And i have never used more than 5GB on one day. So for me it is absolutely perfect.
I pay 25 euros ($28) per month for unlimited phone calls, unlimited texts and virtually unlimited 4G data. The only 'limit' I have on my data is that I can use 5GB per day, before it stops (to prevent misuse) but I can reactivate another GB by one click on a button in my carrier's app for free. If that gigabyte runs out I can get another one by repeating that, and another one, and another one..
So basically it is unlimited 4G. And i have never used more than 5GB on one day. So for me it is absolutely perfect.
Couldn't agree more.
Telecom in general in the US is a scam. My renter in the US pays $50/month for "Extra fast" home internet speeds of "up to" 40mb/s down; 5mb/s up.
Since moving abroad, I pay $15/month for the most basic plan available (900mb/s down; 350mb/s up). It's laughable.
It does matter! If you keep iterating compromises over time while charging top dollar you end up with the Apple of today. Expensive, second rate products, that are made out of cheap components, with a build quality to match.
So what if it's not the fastest chip, or the fastest modem, or the largest capacity, or the largest battery, or the largest screen, or quality screen, or if the touch capacitors have blind spots, or the housing is cheap and bends, or the components cant handle the voltage we demand them as we skimped on that as well. We have a brand damn it (for the moment), and people will pay for it (for the moment).
Demand better, you are certainly being charged like it.
Average 5% difference in download speed is negligible and therefore doesn't matter.
What matters is the overall end user experience, which despite all the things you have mentioned is still better on iPhone.
How's the coverage for t-mobile? I'm moving into a new home soon and I have to switch to Ziggo to get a respectable internet speed there. Which means I'll lose the most valuable pro for KPN: double data. So I'm most likely switching to t-mobile once I'm due for a new contract.
None of this matters because the phone you have is going to have the speed it has wherever you are. But I find it funny that if:
- Random article says Apple is faster or better - thread full of "experts" extolling the virtues of Apple's superiority... and profit ←
- Random article says another company faster or better - thread full of "expert deniers" downplaying and poo pooing and rationalizing Apple not being the best.
If it was Apple getting the best speeds, a lot of people would be bragging about it. If I paid $400 for my phone, I wouldn't have much to say but we paid $1,000 for this ****. Premium prices. We should be getting the most of out of our tech, not accepting less and thanking Apple for it.Oh no!! A second of my life lost again
There are a huge number of fascinating variables which could be contributing to these figures. Geography especially can play a big part in the average connection speeds in different countries - and not just from a political / economic perspective. Countries which are generally "flatter" and have fewer hills, mountains, cliffs and other obstructions are significantly easier to build reliable, high speed mobile coverage for. Alongside this, the average architecture and construction material / building density can play a huge role. I used to work for a telecommunication firm here in the UK, and one of the places we struggled with the most was London: not just because of the density / number of people, but the physical structure of the place. The width of the roads, the predominantly stone and brick buildings, and the height of telegraph poles / power pylons all made it a nightmare to reliably and cost effectively build out wireless coverage.
While it might sound absurd, there was a huge issue we faced where a very famous street in the very middle of London had large brick buildings at precisely the right width apart across the road to cause high speed carrier wireless broadband signals to "destructively reflect" and cripple itself... a consideration architects wouldn't have thought about a couple of hundred years ago! It's this reason why sometimes one country, one city, or even one road to another can mysteriously have wildly better or worse coverage than the next one over: all the telcos and governments around the world are aiming to get as close to 100% coverage and ultra-high-speed as possible, it's just sometimes physics really isn't on our side.
Alongside this, in many countries, the telco infrastructure is heavily governed: the choice of equipment which can be used in the "backbone" of the network is very highly restricted. This is going to play a huge role in differences in speeds for different device types: it makes sense, for instance, that in countries like China and Korea where Huawei and Samsung are based, that the telecommunication infrastructure will mostly be provided by those companies too... meaning their own devices will be obviously significantly more optimised and tested for those networks.
While it might sound absurd, there was a huge issue we faced where a very famous street in the very middle of London had large brick buildings at precisely the right width apart across the road to cause high speed carrier wireless broadband signals to "destructively reflect" and cripple itself... a consideration architects wouldn't have thought about a couple of hundred years ago! It's this reason why sometimes one country, one city, or even one road to another can mysteriously have wildly better or worse coverage than the next one over: all the telcos and governments around the world are aiming to get as close to 100% coverage and ultra-high-speed as possible, it's just sometimes physics really isn't on our side.
Alongside this, in many countries, the telco infrastructure is heavily governed: the choice of equipment which can be used in the "backbone" of the network is very highly restricted. This is going to play a huge role in differences in speeds for different device types: it makes sense, for instance, that in countries like China and Korea where Huawei and Samsung are based, that the telecommunication infrastructure will mostly be provided by those companies too... meaning their own devices will be obviously significantly more optimised and tested for those networks.
I skimmed through the full report, and didn't see anywhere where they mentioned they controlled for confounding variables like the choice of carrier/network. If the phone brands are not uniformly distributed across networks, then some or all of the difference in average download speeds could be due to brand-dependent differences in carrier preference rather than phone hardware.
This survey is more a measure of which phones each carriers customers prefers and the quality of their network, but most importantly the living location of the users. Do Samsung users live in the center or at universities ...
The issue I raised isn't whether the data is available to account for confounding variables, it's whether they did such accounting. In every study I've read where such accounting was done, it's prominently mentioned. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in their report.
What's your excuse? Ours is Thatcher sold off BT to the highest bidder and scuppered upgrade plans.
Using that logic, people pay $$$ for a Ferrari and they can’t even drive it in the snow. One would think for $$$ it should be a snow mobile.
That variability would apply to all handsets on all networks. Some networks will perform better with Samsung, some better with Apple, and most will perform equally. That's born out by the data from the report. Across 3 billion interactions and 23 million devices the effect is pretty much null. The article does a good job of explaining that the modems used across the product lines makes a big difference.
In the end, it really doesn't matter. We're talking small percentages that only mean something on paper since we only have the phone that we have so another phone - that we don't have - being faster or slower doesn't mean anything.
Opensignal...how do you do your measurements? Do you ask app developers to embed code? Piggyback off of Speedtest.net? App on the App Store?
Samsung smartphone users in the United States experience faster LTE data speeds on average than Apple iPhone users, according to a recent global study conducted by Opensignal.
The study looked at over 3 billion measurements from more than 23 million devices from April 1 to June 30, 2019, concluding that Samsung users in the U.S. experienced download speeds 8.2Mb/s faster than iPhone users on average.
Samsung users also saw faster download speeds than Apple users in 35 percent of countries, across 40 countries analyzed. Apple users saw faster speeds in just 17.5 percent of countries, and in the remaining 48 percent, neither Apple nor Samsung (nor Huawei) offered the fastest devices.
Apple's iPhones had the biggest edge over Samsung in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates, where iPhone speeds were 8Mb/s faster than Samsung device speeds. Samsung had the biggest edge over Apple in Norway, where Samsung users saw mobile speeds that were 14Mb/s faster than those experienced by Apple users.
All in all, Apple's iPhones were faster than Samsung and Huawei (the third most popular worldwide smartphone) in Brazil, Costa Rica, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and UAE.
Samsung won out in the United States, Australia, Chile, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, and Sweden.
Opensignal's testing split smartphone users into three groups (low, mid, and high-tier) based on each smartphone's mobile network capabilities, with the highest tier representing the newest smartphones with technology than Opensignal says is more sensitive to mobile network improvements.
Amid higher-tier smartphones, differences in speeds between the three largest smartphone brands (Apple, Samsung, and Huawei) were smaller. Higher-tier smartphones included the iPhone XS and XS Max, along with the Galaxy S8, S9, and S10, among others.
Higher-tier Samsung users saw faster speeds than Apple and Huawei users with global download speeds of 26.6Mb/s vs. 25.1Mb/s (Apple) vs. 24.4Mb/s (Huawei), but Apple users saw the fastest speeds of the three in the mid-tier category, which included the iPhone XR, X, and 8, along with the Samsung M40 and A80 and others.
Middle tier iPhone users, which make up the bulk of Apple users, saw speeds of 16.5Mb/s, compared to 16.3Mb/s for Huawei users and 14.4Mb/s for Samsung users. Samsung ultimately won out in the higher-tier smartphone category (aka the newest devices) and won the overall speed contest because most iPhone users have iPhones with slower modem hardware.
Samsung and Huawei have prioritized "Gigabit" LTE modems over the course of the last few years, while Apple's only devices with modems in that class are the iPhone XS and the XS Max. Even the iPhone XR, a 2018 device, doesn't have an LTE modem comparable to the modem chips Samsung has been using for the last couple of years.Apple's 2019 version of the iPhone XR is expected to feature faster LTE speeds that may eventually help Apple gain an edge over Samsung. The looming worldwide adoption of 5G will also shake things up, though Apple is not set to start debuting 5G capable devices until 2020, while Samsung already has 5G devices in 2019.
More detail from Opensignal's report can be found on the Opensignal website.
Article Link: Study Suggests Samsung Users In U.S. See Faster Download Speeds Than Apple iPhone Users on Average
Edit:app your in competition to Speedtest. No thanks, not participating.
"Apple's iPhones had the biggest edge over Samsung in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates, where iPhone speeds were 8Mb/s faster than Samsung device speeds."
That's not how I'm reading the data -- Apple was nearly 15Mb/s faster than Samsung in the UAE
That's not how I'm reading the data -- Apple was nearly 15Mb/s faster than Samsung in the UAE
Good news for Apple is that Samsung (along with pretty much of all tech/car/etc industries in S.Korea) is going down the drain now that S.Korea has been taken off from Japan's "White List".
That's what they get for secretly selling controlled substances imported from Japan for semiconductor production, etc to N.Korea, Iran, Syria, etc for developing nukes, VF gas, etc. They even tried to blame it all on Japan when they got busted!
It appears that Huawei and other techies in China was also getting stuff illegally through S.Korea, so Apple may get lucky and survive the tariff ordeal with S.Korea's screw up that's likely going to knock Samsung, LG, etc as well as Huawei off the map pretty soon.
That's what they get for secretly selling controlled substances imported from Japan for semiconductor production, etc to N.Korea, Iran, Syria, etc for developing nukes, VF gas, etc. They even tried to blame it all on Japan when they got busted!
It appears that Huawei and other techies in China was also getting stuff illegally through S.Korea, so Apple may get lucky and survive the tariff ordeal with S.Korea's screw up that's likely going to knock Samsung, LG, etc as well as Huawei off the map pretty soon.