PC Magazine July 2017

TUCSON: AT&T
Tucson wasn’t one of our fastest cities, but AT&T
separates itself from a tight pack with a noticeable lead
on download speeds. We saw 100Mbps maximums in
the city, while some other places showed 200Mbps. But
AT&T users won’t have a problem: It got an average of
34Mbps down with solid consistency across the city.
Verizon came in second with equally solid reliability.
Sprint had a tough time in Tucson. Its performance was
so poor that we double-checked to make sure our test
server selection wasn’t a problem; performance was just
as bad to a different server. We can’t recommend Sprint
in Tucson at this time.
T-Mobile’s
network blazes
in the nation’s
capital, with
the highest
upload and
download
speeds and the
lowest latency.
WASHINGTON, DC: T-MOBILE
T-Mobile’s network blazes in the nation’s capital, with
the highest upload and download speeds and the lowest
latency of any carrier. That makes it by far the best
choice for Washington area residents.
Sprint, as we saw elsewhere, just got socked by the
variability of its network. While Sprint’s maximum
speeds are nothing to be ashamed of, it couldn’t keep
those speeds up across our ten test sites. Our test sites
at Courthouse in Arlington and just south of the
Smithsonian especially suffered. A new technology
called HPUE (high performance user equipment) in the
Galaxy S8 is supposed to help smooth out those peaks
and valleys, and we saw that in our initial Galaxy S8
review, but it didn’t bear out on the streets of DC.
Verizon and AT&T both managed to occasionally reach
some spectacular speeds. Verizon blew past the
competition near American University with average
speeds over 100Mbps. But T-Mobile takes the day
across the metro area as a whole.