Fastest Mobile Networks 2012: Where We Tested
Our drivers have now covered 30 cities to find the fastest wireless networks. Which carrier offers the best data service near you? You'll find out soon.
Over the past month, PCMag has covered 30 U.S. cities for our annual project, blowing out two AC inverters, suffering one case of food poisoning, and putting several thousand miles on our three Ford Taurus cars.
We've been driving with eight phones in each back seat to test the nation's top five wireless carriers: AT&T, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. With the data we've collected, we'll be able to tell you which 3G or 4G network is best near you.
We still , though. If you have an Android-powered smartphone, download the Sensorly app from the Google Play market and run a few speed tests. If we get enough results, we'll add your numbers to ours for an even better picture of wireless network speeds across America.
Now we're going into hardcore number-crunching mode. We collected about 240,000 data points as our test software took five measurements: HTTP download speed, HTTP upload speed, two types of streaming, and network reliability. Using a custom-built 6-processor desktop PC, we're analyzing our data for our mid-June feature.
In the past week, our drivers have visited ten cities across America. You can see their routes in the map below.
Click through the following pages for some of the highlights from their drives, and check out the they hit last week, and of testing. —