iPhone 4S Carrier Tests: Verizon Most Reliable, AT&T Fastest

iPhone 4S carrier testing performed by Metrico Wireless found that Verizon wireless is the most reliable and AT&T is the fastest, according to LRM.

Metrico did its first round of tests back in March on the iPhone 4 with AT&T and Verizon. But, now that all three carriers have Apple Inc.'s latest 4s iPhone, the vendor spent the past month performing more than 21,000 Web-page downloads, 8,000 download/upload tests and 6,000 voice calls on real and simulated networks, stationary and in motion.

Notable Findings:
● Verizon iPhones made and held calls successfully slightly more than its competitors' versions, with a 2.1 percent call failure rate, but AT&T beat out Sprint with a 2.8 percent call-failure rate compared to Sprint's 3.7 percent.
● Amit Malhotra, VP of marketing at Metrico, says that the average dropped call rate for the industry is 1.4 percent, making the iPhone 4S a poor performer in general. It was worse than the average for Verizon's smartphones, but -- interestingly -- in the top three best for AT&T. Metrico is making no guesses as to why the differences occur, but Malhotra notes that, in general, new features and functionalities in phones could have an impact on core functionality.
● Sprint's iPhone performed better on live network voice quality on the uplink, but AT&T was better on the downlink. Verizon lagged in both. (Metrico wasn't able to measure this back in March for AT&T versus Verizon, but it can now thanks to a new algorithm for cross-carrier speech quality analysis, Malhotra says.)
● AT&T topped the pack for data upload and download speeds, and the iPhone 4S was significantly improved on data over the iPhone 4.
● AT&T beat Sprint and Verizon on Web-browsing speeds. It also topped other smartphones in each carrier's portfolio, whereas the iPhone 4 was below average.
● If you don't move, AT&T's download speeds far outperformed its competitors and showed a 60% improvement over its previous-generation iPhone.
● Data task reliability was near 100 percent for stationary downloads and uploads for all three carriers, which is a dramatic improvement over the iPhone 4 for AT&T and Verizon.
● Videos performed well on all three networks, but YouTube Inc. videos caused the frame delivery rate to drop somewhat.


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