Test Your iPhone’s 3G Speed

by Eric March on September 1, 2008 at 2:56 am

There are half a metric ton of speed test sites out there, and they all work well enough for home computers and laptops, but until recently there hasn’t been anything tailored specifically for the iPhone.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I ran across an article describing a service called TestMyiPhone.com. This speed test site is designed specifically for the iPhone, and allows you to test your EDGE, 3G and/or WiFi speeds, both upstream and downstream, and it seems to work quite well. It’s quite feature rich and provides general test stats from countries all around the world. You can even create a free account and track your own speed tests, so you can test from different areas, at different times of day, just to see what your speeds are like where you most frequently hang out.

This is where TestMyiPhone really shines, particularly at a time like this. With so many reports of crippled 3G speeds since the latest iPhone’s launch, this can provide an excellent metric against which to compare speeds globally to see where the trouble spots seem to be and perhaps finally put to bed the question of whether it’s hardware, software, or network that seems to be getting in the way of those who have been experiencing problems.

For what it’s worth, my 3G test results, tested from just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Rogers network), were quite favourable, though inconsistent, with downstream speads hitting a minimum of about 1.4Mbits/s and peaking at a little over 2.6Mbits/s, across 17 tests, though approximately 75% of tests exceeded 2Mbits/s. (TestMyiPhone does provide a nice set of tracked stats for registered users, but they don’t keep track of minimums or maximums, and with the instability issues of Firmware 2.x, Safari crashed on me 3 times mid-test, so I kept my own tats.) Upstream was pretty consistent, averaging out at 259Kbits/s with only a few Kbits/s variance across all tests.

Keep in mind of course that these are purely synthetic tests that determine maximum throughput of a single file.  Web pages don’t work like that.  They make connections to dozens upon dozens of individual files, and the latency resulting from making those connection is what really kills overall speed when browsing the web — however, as a general rule of thumb it is obviously much faster than EDGE.  (At least, assuming you’re in an area with good 3G coverage, which obviously not everyone is.)

What are your tests like? Post your location and results in the comments and let’s compare notes.

(via ehPhone)

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Posted in Web Apps, iPhone 3G, iPhone Canada, iPhone Related