A quick visit to T-Mobile USA’s website and you are inundated with information about its 4G service. T-Mobile refers to its “supercharged 4G network” as more than 3 times faster than 3G with “blazing-fast” average download speeds of 10Mbps and peak speeds of up to 27Mbps.

UCAN seeing all of these claims of significant speeds decided to put T-Mobile to the test. Michael Shames with a T-Mobile My Touch 4G in hand traveled to some of his most frequented locations to see if he was receiving the service he was paying for. The result T-Mobile failed miserably. Michael conducted multiple tests at 5 outdoor locations around San Diego and his download speeds averaged a paltry 2.74Mbps not even close to advertised average of 10Mbps and he certainly did not experience anything close to peak speeds. No his peak speed during the test was 7.69 Mbps, below even what is suppose to be the average on the network.

These test results are of great concern to UCAN. Consumers should be receiving much faster upload and download speeds on a 4G network. UCAN will be contacting T-Mobile with the results of its test and asking for an explanation as to why its network appears to not be performing as advertised. UCAN will continue to collect network speed data and monitor the situation going forward. Network quality and speed and important features and consumers should at least know the quality of service they will receive when they are considering what services to sign up for.

According to Rethink Wireless,  a recently published study of mobile broadband performance in North, South and Central America by research firm ARCchart reports that Verizon is delivering download speeds in excess of 11Mbps to Android smartphones in many US markets. By comparison, AT&T supports average download speeds of around 2.3Mbps over its HSPA+ network, while Sprint delivers just 1.8Mbps over EV-DO. Despite being the smallest national provider, T-Mobile's HSPA+ network achieves a more respectable average download performance of 3.2Mbps. 

The advantage which Verizon enjoys may be short-lived depending on how aggressively AT&T pushes out it LTE network. The carrier is aiming to have LTE in 14 markets by year-end.While Verizon's LTE network puts its rivals to shame, coverage remains limited. ARCchart estimates that roughly half of Verizon's customers have access to LTE, and when it comes to the performance of Verizon's EV-DO and RevA network the tables are turned, with competitor networks showing notably superior performance.

No doubt, one reason Verizon is able to pump such high speeds through LTE is because the spanking new network has only recently been unboxed, and relatively low user numbers means the network's capacity isn't being taxed. It will be interesting to see how performance changes over the coming 12 months as the number of LTE-enabled devices increases and usages ramps.  But for now, the Verizon LTE offering appears to be putting other "4G" networks to shame.

Has your experience been similar to UCAN's (or the ARCchart report)?   T-Mobile customers let us know your experience with T-Mobile’s 4G service.  Are you receiving anything close to 10Mbps download speeds? Have you ever got close to a peak download speed of 27Mbps? Let us know particular if you are in San Diego whether you have found T-Mobile to be living up to its end of the bargain and if not what if anything you have done to try and change the situation. Have you talked to T-Mobile customer service? If so, what did they tell you? Have you tried to cancel you contract? If yes, were you successful? Let us know, post a comment below or email us at contactus@ucan.org.