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Samsung Galaxy S III 4G HSPA+ Speedtest: AT&T v. T-Mobile (Video)

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While 4G LTE is great on the Samsung Galaxy S III on AT&T’s network, there are times where you either want to use HSPA+ instead to conserve battery life or have traveled or are living in an area with only 4G HSPA+ and not the faster LTE network available. In those instances, customers with AT&T may be asking how fast is their network’s HSPA+ implementation compared to that of T-Mobile? Well, we reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S III for T-Mobile USA and for AT&T and we had also covered how to disable LTE and use HSPA+ on AT&T to conserve power. Now, we’re going to put the two devices running on HSPA+ network technologies to the speedtest and see which network fares better.

Video:

As you can see from the above video, T-Mobile’s implementation of HSPA+ is much faster than AT&T both in terms of upload and download speeds. Additionally, T-Mobile’s latency, derived from the network ping speed from the Speedtest.net app, shows that HSPA+ on T-Mobile also has a lower latency time compared to AT&T’s HSPA+. Lower latency is better as it would allow for less lag, which means that once MMO games start hitting mobile platforms, users can have a better experience there. It’s also beneficial for use with tethering as well if you’re playing an MMO game on your laptop on the go, for example.

T-Mobile 4G HSPA+ network is fast on the download and upload side, beating out AT&T's HSPA+ network, and T-Mobile also has lower latency as well.

AT&T has higher latency, and slower download and upload speeds on HSPA+ compared to T-Mobile's network implementation. Using HSPA+ over 4G LTE does help to save some battery life.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Scott

    06/27/2012 at 9:56 am

    Im not sure where you are getting that t-mobile has lower latency than ATT?? according to your screenshots:

    Tmobile Ping: 1083ms
    AT Ping: 120ms

    When it comes to ping/latency, lower is better. Here ATT is 9x LESS latent than t-mobile (even though the tmobile throughput up and down is greater)

    • tekram

      07/31/2012 at 6:38 am

      Watch the youtube video. On that particular test, the Tmobile latency was 100ms. Tmobile latency can be quite variable.

      • Tynach

        11/04/2012 at 12:28 am

        The T-Mobile phone was barely getting a signal at all if you watch the video, that’s why it was so varied. Obviously in an area with stronger signal strength, you’ll get better latency.

  2. David

    08/02/2012 at 2:05 pm

    I think it all depends on location and available network for the phone..I have a Galaxy blaze 4G (tmobile) and I did my on test using that same app and i was able to get 23.54mbps DL/ 2.94mbps UL with a 64ms latency at home. Yet at work on a different part of town I may manage a to get 5-10 mbps download and 500kbps-1mbps upload…so location definetly plays a part

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