iPhone 3G’s network speeds around the world

Wired published an article where they survived speed tests for the iPhone 3G around the word. Over 2,600 people participated in the test around the world. Australia had the slowest 3G speeds and T-Mobile in Europe experienced the fastest with Canadian carriers coming in second and AT&T in the US in third. The results of Wired’s experiment are bellow:

By country:

• Participants in Australia reported the slowest average 3G download speeds of about 759 Kbps.

• The most “0″ results for 3G download speeds came from U.S. participants — presumably those dropped from the 3G network. In the United States, 63 participants reported “0″ Altogether there were 80 “0″ figures reported.

• Users in Germany and the Netherlands reported the fastest average 3G download speeds — about 2,000 Kbps.

In some major metropolitan areas that are supposedly 3G-rich, 3G performance can be very slow. For example, zooming in on San Francisco, you’ll see that 10 out of 30 participants reported very slow 3G speeds — barely surpassing EDGE.

• This pattern is linear with femtocell developer Dave Nowicki’s explanation that in major metropolitan cities where the most iPhone users reside, 3G towers are getting overloaded, resulting in slowdowns or delivering EDGE-like performance as a result.

By carrier:

• European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average. Factoid: Europe has some of the most mature 3G networks, which have been in development since 2001. (AT&T introduced its 3G network in the United States in 2004.)

• Canadian carriers Rogers and Fido tied for second fastest with an average download speed of about 1,330 Kbps on average.

• U.S. carrier AT&T tied for third with Telstra, Telia and Softbank, where users reported average download speeds of roughly 990 Kbps.

• Australian carriers Optus and Virgin users reported the slowest speeds of about 390 Kbps on average.

Other figures:

Overall, 2,636 iPhone 3G owners participated in the study (that doesn’t count more than a thousand entries which were completely blank or so incomplete as to be unusable).

• 1,638 were in the United States

• 233 were in Australia

• 152 were in Canada

-Ray

[Source: wired]