iPhone beats Droid in Manhattan speed tests
Note to New Yorkers: Carry your new Droid phone to Wall Street, Grand Central Terminal, Union Square, or Madison Square Park, and you may find AT&T iPhone users — the ones who are always complaining — are actually downloading data at five times the speed of your Verizon phone.
A new report from mid-market investment banking firm Piper Jaffray rebuts the conventional wisdom on the relative performance of a new Verizon Droid phone versus AT&T’s iPhones. The three analysts summarized, “While there were certainly locations where the iPhone was bested by the Droid, two-thirds of the time the iPhone had much better throughput.” They went on to rate AT&T’s stock as overweight, meaning you should buy more of it despite the conventional wisdom that AT&T’s iPhone deal with Apple has brought down the company’s value.
The report, obtained by VentureBeat, raises the stakes on last weekend’s New York Times story that cited several studies which found AT&T’s network speed to be better than Verizons. Generally, those reports claimed that the iPhone itself was the problem, because of its supposedly weak wireless range and speed compared to other mobile phones. (I’ve anecdotally heard from professional wireless network engineers that the iPhone doesn’t pick up and receive wireless signal as well as other phones on the same network. “It’s a weak transceiver,” one said.)
The news in Piper Jaffray’s report is that despite any weakness in the iPhone, despite iPhone overcrowding in Manhattan, and despite the supposed superior speed of the Droid phone itself (”a racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile,” one Droid ad says), an iPhone user in Manhattan gets much better network speed in two-thirds of the Manhattan locations tested by Piper’s analysts. The Droid did better in Times Square, Central Park, and Rockefeller Center among other locations.
AT&T and Verizon won’t comment on the report directly, but AT&T did confirm to Piper Jaffray that the company is nationally adding 2,000 new cell sites and 100,000 new circuits for backhaul, and allocating more of its 850 MHz wireless spectrum capacity towards faster 3G services.
[Image: TheiPhoneBlog]
