Wired.com’s iPhone 3G Survey Reveals Network Weaknesses

Wired: Gadget Lab

Wired.com’s survey of iPhone 3G users’ suggests that widespread data speed problems have more to do with carriers’ networks than with Apple’s handsets.

Recently Wired.com asked iPhone 3G users all around the
world to participate in a study, which involved testing their 3G speeds
and entering their data on an interactive map. The purpose? To gain a
general idea of how 3G was performing — where it’s best and where it’s
worst — in light of widespread complaints about the handset’s network
performance. More than 2,600 people participated (wow!) and we’ve
diligently cleaned up the data to present it to you here.

In the map above, each colored bar indicates the relative 3G download speed for an individual respondent. Purple dots represent several respondents clustered together geographically. (If you don’t see many colored bars, zoom in on an area until the purple dots disappear and are replaced by colored bars.) To speak very generally, the data overall
shows that 3G is performing faster than EDGE (which is expected). In
the best scenarios, 3G is up to seven times faster than EDGE; in worse
scenarios, 3G performed just as slowly as EDGE; at worst, some users
couldn’t connect to 3G at all — which isn’t surprising since 3G towers
are not yet ubiquitous.

Detailed observations from the survey follow.

• By country:
  • Participants in Australia reported the slowest average 3G download speeds of about 759 Kbps.
  • The most "0" results for 3G download speeds came from U.S. participants — presumably those dropped from the 3G network. In the United States, 63 participants reported "0" Altogether there were 80 "0" figures reported.
  • Users in Germany and the Netherlands reported the fastest average 3G download speeds — about 2,000 Kbps.
• In some major metropolitan areas that are supposedly 3G-rich, 3G performance can be very slow. For example, zooming in on San Francisco, you’ll see that 10 out of 30 participants reported very slow 3G speeds — barely surpassing EDGE.
  • This
    pattern is linea up with femtocell developer Dave Nowicki’s explanation
    that in major metropolitan cities where the most iPhone users reside,
    3G towers are getting overloaded, resulting in slowdowns or delivering
    EDGE-like performance as a result.
• By carrier:
  • European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average.
    • Factoid: Europe has some of the most mature 3G networks, which have been in development since 2001. (AT&T introduced its 3G network in the United States in 2004.)
  • Canadian carriers Rogers and Fido tied for second fastest with an average download speed of about 1,330 Kbps on average.
  • U.S. carrier AT&T tied for third with Telstra, Telia and Softbank, where users reported average download speeds of roughly 990 Kbps.
  • Australian carriers Optus and Virgin users reported the slowest speeds of about 390 Kbps on average.

Other figures:

• Overall, 2,636 iPhone 3G owners participated in the study (that doesn’t count more than a thousand entries which were completely blank or so incomplete as to be unusable).
  • 1,638 were in the United States
  • 233 were in Australia
  • 152 were in Canada
  • The majority of the remaining participants reported results from European countries

Assess what you will, Gadget Lab readers. In our view, this data is a
strong indicator that performance of the mobile carrier’s network is
affecting the iPhone 3G more than the handset itself. This also
furthers our thesis that it’s highly unlikely that Apple is going to
wave a magical wand and say, "3G problems, be gone," with a software
update. Before Apple can make such a claim, it needs to wait for all of
its carriers to optimize 3G network behavior — in terms of number of
towers, how they’re positioned and how much bandwidth each tower can
handle.

Want to see the raw data from which we drew the above map? We’re
providing a Google spreadsheet at this link: All the data from Wired.com’s iPhone
3G study. That spreadsheet includes data on 3G download and upload speeds as well as
EDGE download and upload speeds (where available), and we’ve taken the
trouble of making all the data more or less consistent (in Kbps) and
fairly accessible. If you use this data to do your own charts, maps, or other analyses, we’d love to hear about them, so please put a link to your own analyses in the comments.

With all that said, Wired.com would like
to extend a thank you to each of the 2,636 who participated in the
study (4,200 if you include those who insufficiently participated).
We’d also like to thank TestMyiPhone.com
for providing the service for participants to test the iPhone — and
especially for buying a new server just to handle the large amount of
users testing their iPhones for our study.

I’d also like to recognize the Wired.com staff members who helped put together this study:

• Dylan Tweney for his arduous efforts in cleaning up this massive amount of data

• Kent Carter for making the Zeemap easily digestible by assigning those wonderful color-bar markers
• Holl Liou for designing the custom color-bar markers

And last but not least, all the blogs that linked to our study, to help us gather so much data: Gizmodo, MacRumors, ArsTechnica, TUAW, The iPhone Blog, T4 Show, iFones and Swik. We owe each of you a big one.

Also see:

• Angry iPhone 3G Customer Sues Apple
• Apple: iPhone Update Improves 3G Network Performance
• Video: AT&T Blames iPhone 3G For Network Issues
• Opinion: Firmware Update to Fix iPhone 3G? I Doubt It
• Participate in Wired.com’s Global iPhone 3G Study
• What’s Wrong With the 3G in iPhone 3G?
• IPhone 3G Users Heated Over Network Issues

Tutorial: Turn Your iPhone Into a Wireless Modem

Wired: Gadget Lab

Here at Wired.com a few of us were excited about turning our iPhones
into wireless modems with the $10 NetShare application — but none of
us could get it to work. Fortunately, we got our connections up and running with some help straight from
NetShare’s maker, Nullriver. So we’ve created a step-by-step tutorial
in case you’re stuck, too.

Before we begin, do note that we could not get FireFox 3 to work with
NetShare using Nullriver’s settings; the company said it only tested
the app on FireFox 2. Safari, however, works just fine. Without further
ado, here’s our tutorial:

Step 1: Download NetShare

Search for NetShare in the iPhone’s App Store (yes, it’s there now). Pay 10 bucks and download it.

Step 2: Create a New Network

On your Mac, click on your Airport icon and select "Create Network." Type whatever
name you’d like: We used "iPhone tether" with the channel set to
Automatic (11). Then click OK.

Step 3: Open System Preferences –> Network

In the Network panel in System Preferences, select your Airport connection and click "Advanced."

Step 4: Configure TCP/IP

Choose the TCP/IP tab. Select "Using DHCP with manual address" and set your IPv4 Address to 192.168.10.2.

Step 5: Configure Proxies

Click the Proxies tab. Now, checkmark the "SOCKS Proxy" box and enter
192.168.10.1 in the SOCKS Proxy server. After the colon, enter 1080 as
the port number. Click OK and then hit the Apply button.

Step 6: Select Your Network on iPhone

In your iPhone’s Settings app, choose your the network you created and hit the blue arrow.

Step 7: Configure Static Settings

Hit the Static tab and enter 192.168.10.1 for the IP address.

Step 8: Open NetShare

Now open NetShare and run Safari on your Mac. You should be able to start browsing the web.

Step 9 (Optional): Confirm Connection

If you want to double check whether you’re connected, load Terminal (in the Utilities folder) on your Mac and type "ping 192.168.10.1." If you see some activity,
you’re all set.

(Photo credit: Florent Brunel/Flickr )

(Screenshots by Wired.com)