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Paulshaqz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 10, 2009
905
174
was curious on your thoughts for all you bay area people which 4g lte is faster as living in the bay area i'm confused which i should i get i do own att iPhone 4s.
 
i was thinking of buying an att 4g but i know the verizon 4g lte is more realiable.
 
Verizon, with LTE, should be faster.

Better performance? I don't know.

Here in South San Jose, AT&T is better than Verizon at 3G speeds.
 
Some say AT&T lte is faster than Verizon. But how many people are on AT&T lte network? It's practically empty. Like driving a car on the highway, you can always go faster when no one is on the road. Add cars to the road and you will see a different result. My vote would be Verizon is better.
 
Some say AT&T lte is faster than Verizon. But how many people are on AT&T lte network? It's practically empty. Like driving a car on the highway, you can always go faster when no one is on the road. Add cars to the road and you will see a different result. My vote would be Verizon is better.

iv'e been seeing a mixed bag but everybody so far has said verizon in my case thank you for the response been trying to find answers on the net when i couldn't find anything.
 
Careful, if you choose Verizon, and you are in a non-LTE zone, you will go down to slow 3G.
 
But who has a better LTE footprint? Has to be Verizon. They have a far superior 3G footprint over AT&T.
 
But who has a better LTE footprint? Has to be Verizon. They have a far superior 3G footprint over AT&T.

Yes they do. ATT will catch up at some point. But as of today or next week, Verizon is king of REAL 4G. Not that fake 3+ made to believe it's 4G put out by AT&Trash.
 
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In the case AT&T vs Verizon when it comes to data, I will always choose AT&T. I find it more reliable
 
Yes they do. ATT will catch up at some point. But as of today or next week, Verizon is king of REAL 4G. Not that fake 3+ made to believe it's 4G put out by AT&Trash.

you sold me when you said verizon is real king of 4g!
 
In the bay? Probably VZW still. I had a Skyrocket for awhile it pulled down 50-60Mbps from my place in Alameda, but VZW's network is definitely more built out when you leave the Bay Area.
 
If your area has AT&T LTE, and you don't plan to leave the area, I think AT&T will be the significantly faster service. They have far fewer devices on the network, and likely will at least throughout this year. If you do leave, you should have pretty good HSPA+ coverage. It's not LTE, but it's still capable of doing 7mbps in many areas. Maybe it will be even higher than that. I don't know.

I chose Verizon because Verizon has LTE coverage all around the northeast, where I am primarily, and AT&T only has coverage in Boston and NYC. I was in Vermont this past weekend skiing, and 4G LTE was available from Verizon. I am not sure if AT&T will even have LTE this year in my area.
 
I been testing a verizon lte miff around the bay area and you generally always get over 10 down. Going forward, verizon has more spectrum than ATT and should have the better network. ATT LTE is just starting up. The real test for them will be once the new iPhone is out as majority of iPhone owners are on their network.
 
Yes they do. ATT will catch up at some point. But as of today or next week, Verizon is king of REAL 4G. Not that fake 3+ made to believe it's 4G put out by AT&Trash.

Yes, Verizon may be the "king" of real 4G, but thier 3G sucks in terms of speed. BTW: Both the AT&T and Verizon iPads (3rd generation) both have 73mbps, so both iPads will be the same speed (on LTE).
 
Network speed is relative to proximity to LTE towers, latency, crowding, and a few other factors. If you want the larger footprint, Verizon has the larger footprint however speed does not equal speed so if you drop out of LTE coverage, your data rate slows down a LOT. AT&T on the other hand has a smaller footprint but has great coverage in metropolitan areas. You'll see that AT&T speeds are higher just due to how they place the towers and the number of people using LTE. If you drop down to HSPA, you'll still experience about normal broadband speeds which is still plenty good. The only way to really tell which network is faster in your areas of use is to use comparable hardware and use both services to test which ones are higher in the areas that matter to you. I'll be with AT&T since I have the best coverage in my area through them and I also need international service every so often.
 
Just started my LTE plan yesterday with Verizon and here are some Speedtest numbers I'm getting:

San Jose server:
Down: 12.44 - 15.94 Mbps
Up: 11.63 - 20.26 Mbps
Ping: 39 ms

Palo Alto server:
Down: 19.29 - 29.97 Mpbs
Up: 13.24 - 15.21 Mbps
Ping: 50 ms

My iPhone 4S and home DSL speeds are around 4Mps Down and .5-1Mbps Up, so I'm thrilled with these LTE speeds. Like whtrbt7 mentioned, individual results will vary.

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With my Verizon iPad on a drive from Hayward to Palo Alto, I only got 3G except for a few minutes when the LTE icon came on. I repeated this consistently on different days. I was sitting in my car at the Stanford Shopping Center in a wide open area and only got 3G!!! Can anyone explain this? I also could not even connect to the network from some spots in the Stanford industrial park area. I returned my Verizon iPad and don't know what to do at this point.
 
It all depends on the area. It sounds like Verizon is the best choice for the OP. However, I can't complain about the 42mbps down and 19mbs up in my city over AT&T.

I have read several times that once an LTE iPhone comes out that AT&T's network will slow down. However, there will also be millions of additional users on Verizon's network as well. Who knows?

Verizon has the awesome hotspot feature. AT&T has the best price for a mid range data plan (3GB for $30), Verizon has more LTE coverage, AT&T has far better fallback coverage.

You could drive yourself crazy trying to decide! :)
 
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