Thanksgiving weekend is about to start and so is retail sales time. Two years ago US consumers spent over $1bn on Cyber Monday – more than any other big sale day in 2010. If you live in San Francisco and have been procrastinating your 4G smartphone purchase till the holidays, be sure to analyze this AT&T vs. Verizon performance guide before you swipe your credit card on Monday!
Looking at the top spots in the city featured in the performance chart above, you quickly notice there is not an ultimate winner in the Silicon Valley mobile Internet battle. If you like to hang out and stream Katy Perry’s videos around Union Sq, AT&T with half the theoretical top LTE speed is your preferred carrier. If you rather watch Giants’ game while indulging some fresh crabmeat at Fisherman’s Wharf, you should go for Verizon.
Interestingly enough, despite over 21 Mb/s download speed on AT&T network in the Financial District it can take around 34 seconds to load New York Times website on an iPhone 5. That’s almost 4 times slower than the average website load time on a mobile device.
ATT vs. Verizon performance result prove that user experience with mobile Internet cannot be measured purely in Mb/s. How to make Internet websites load faster on mobile devices? Look for the answer in the next blog post.
Tech Surprises 
I’d be interested to see what the latency figures were