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4G LTE has quickly became the new standard for high speed mobile networks. Verizon and AT&T have had and have pushed out the technology to many markets and areas across the US over the years. Sprint who seemed to have dropped the ball when it came to that area, has been working on their own 4G LTE networks and so far, are looking pretty promising. If you’re not a Sprint customer, currently they have WiMax which, while does deliver good speeds, isn’t nearly as good as it’s much bigger brother.
Sprint users who have a WiMax enabled phone will still get access to that, but up through the rest of this year when the carrier will be phasing it out in turn for their new, better, faster networks. For the Fastest Mobile Networks project, PC Mag got the opportunity to test Sprint’s 4G LTE network at five different locations in Atlanta, Georgia. The tests were performed on a specially provisioned LG Viper 4G LTE using two different speed test apps, Sensorly and Speedtest.net which many of us are familiar with.
So, the speeds. At four different locations and according to the Sensorly app, they managed to get between 9 and 13mbps. Peak download speeds were quite impressive, clocking in at 26.5mbps down. Speeds were comparable to AT&T and Verizon, however AT&T had faster speeds on their 5MHZ channel cities and Verizon’s was a bit slower, then again, they’ve got more people using the network.
When it comes to upload speeds, Sprint is lacking a bit in that area, though the networks are constantly being tweaked for when they arrive to the masses so we should hopefully see this improve. They saw upload speeds averaging 2.19Mbps which isn’t that bad and definitely sufficient enough for sending files. Uploading video, that’s another thing and depends on how huge the video.
All in all, Sprint’s 4G LTE network seems to be able to compete with the masses. Now let’s just hope they can keep their unlimited data plans for customers that get to experience the faster networks, and not experience the idea of having a limited amount of data each month like their competitors.
