Is T-Mobile’s 3G Slowing Everywhere?…
…or just here, in North Coastal San Diego County?
Back towards the beginning of this year, I was amused by Verizon’s campaign to illustrate that their 3G network is significantly larger than AT&T’s, and even more amused when AT&T responded that they “cover more people,” displaying a map that looked bigger than Verizon’s.
I wonder how many people never figured-out that the AT&T map, which “looked better,” was actually a map of their voice coverage, and not their 3G coverage?
About that same time, I began reading all kinds of scathing reports about how AT&T’s 3G coverage was not just spotty, but really pretty slow in some areas.
All of that back-and-forth got me wondering… I had started noticing what I perceived to be a slow-down in the 3G service provided by T-Mobile on my wife’s Android phone, and decided to see how well it was really performing, by conducting a series of speed tests over time.
Now granted, this is by no means a scientific test, but here’s what I did:
- I downloaded SpeedTest from the Android market (QR code is to the right).
- I set SpeedTest to use a server nearby. I used the same server for all of my tests.
- Every now-and-again, I’d sit on my deck, in the same chair, facing the same way, at the same time of the day, and run SpeedTest.
The results I’ve gotten are pretty dramatic, and seem to support my theory that the T-Mobile “3G Experience” here is on the decline:
I’d be very interested in hearing from other T-Mobile users, to hear about how their 3G network has been performing over-time in their area.
Also, if you’d like me to keep the chart updated in the future (I’m testing all the time), feel free to contact me, or simply reply to this post.
I’ve got this diagram set to automatically update each time I run the test (monthly), so just check-back to see my latest results.
