Although Verizon blows AT&T out of the water when it comes to service reliability and customer satisfaction, when it comes to the hard numbers of how fast the iPhone 4 can download data, the winner is AT&T.
The Verizon iPhone came out last month, but the amount of fanfare it received was less than spectacular. There were no lines to speak of on launch day, and added staff at Apple and Verizon stores around the country ended up with nothing to do.
Now, there’s even more of a disappointment for the newly sanctioned iPhone carrier, as a report from independent mobile analyst firm Metrico Wireless found Verizon failed to match the speeds of AT&T when performing data tests.
Metrico studied the performance of AT&T and Verizon in five cities across the country. It found that AT&T’s iPhone was able to download data about twice as fast as the Verizon one, however other factors were not as notable.
For example, Web page load times were about the same on both devices, and when in a moving vehicle, the AT&T had a 10% higher success rate. However, when in a stationary environment, the Verizon iPhone was actually more successful, by about 10%.
AT&T has done a lot to improve its network since the introduction of the iPhone, but it still ranks at the bottom of the list whenever consumer studies are done on overall network stability and customer service.
Nevertheless, the iPhone was built with AT&T in mind, and it looks like at least in some metrics, that means it does better there.
