3G survey: Sprint and Verizon neck-and-neck, AT&T lags in reliability

The editors at PC World teamed up with wireless testing firm Novarum to take a "single-day snapshot" of nationwide 3G wireless performance. The results? Verizon Wireless gets the "speed demon" award and Sprint leads the pack in reliability, while AT&T suffers from a dependability gap.

First of all, hats off to PC World for taking the time and effort for such a thorough wireless study, which encompasses three of the biggest U.S. carriers (no results for T-Mobile, unfortunately), 13 cities, 283 testing sites, and nearly 5,500 individual tests. Many of us wireless reviewers only have the resources to test reception by waving a test phone around our back yards, so it's refreshing to see a systematic, coast-to-coast survey.

Anyway, PC World has a chart rating the average download and upload speeds of each carrier for specific cities, along with a percentage reliability rating. The results vary from city to city, naturally, with Verizon dominating in the eastern and central states and Sprint coming out ahead in the West.

Overall, though, PC World gave Verizon high marks for its "good mix of speed and reliability," plus a chart-topping average download speed of 951Kbps. But while Sprint's average download speed of 808Kbps "wasn't flashy," the carrier wins out in dependability, scoring an overall 90.5 reliability ratings.

Then there's AT&T, which placed second to Verizon in terms of average download speeds (812Kbps) but lagged badly in the reliability department—just 68 percent. Ouch.

AT&T's relatively poor reliability score in the PC World survey will certainly fuel the fire of U.S. iPhone users—myself included—who regularly complain about spotty 3G reception. Indeed, I've lost track of how many times my iPhone (showing five bars of reception, mind you) stubbornly refuses to pull down a Web page, while a test Verizon or Sprint phone manages to surf just fine from the exact same location.

Speaking of "more bars in more places," the PC World editors have some interesting things to say about signal-strength bars—namely, that they have little do with whether you'll get good 3G performance. That's because the bars only tell you if your phone has a good connection to a nearby cell tower, not whether your carrier's "backhaul" system is pulling a steady flow of data from the Internet at large, PC World explains. (Now you tell me.)

Make sure to check out PC World's full survey, along with complete results for all the 13 test cities.

So, how's the 3G performance in your area? Who's your carrier? Let us know.

Related:
A Day in the Life of 3G [PC World]