At present I’m in a hotel room with a NovAtel XU870 on AT&T and a Sprint EX720 in a major city that’ll remain nameless. The location of the room (corner room, many buildings around, back-side of the hotel, facing an alley, mid-level floor) ensures ‘interesting’ coverage. So, how do the fabled titans of WWAN stack up?

 AT&T and T-mobile GSM seem to do fine. AT&T and Sprint’s CDMA-based broadband products, however, are apparently having a heck of a time. In AT&T’s case, observed signal level is very very low (-106dBm). I attribute this to having a GSM site closer than the nearest 3G site. I can hit sustained transfer rates of 800Kbps down but it’s incredibly position sensitive. Just a few INCHES and I drop out of HSDPA to UMTS. The connection never stops, but slows dramatically (300Kbps observed, EDGE is providing 210 with no such issues but far more latency).

 Sprint, despite a booming observed signal (-66dBm) is even worse. I’m assuming my current location is shadowed from the cellsite and while I’m getting good forward strength, my guess is that the reverse path back to the site ain’t workin’ out so well. In this case, Sprint has hit higher peak speeds (1420 down) but is far more inconsistent. While the AT&T connection merely drops to UMTS and keeps on truckin’, the Sprint connection just stops and will only transfer data in fits and starts. I would’ve expected a drop to 1xRTT but this didn’t occur. It’s just as well, as forcing the card to that showed the same results as EVDOrA, but with much slower bursts when it did work (92Kbps).

 Moral of this story? EVERY wireless carrier will suck somewhere.  Theoretically, HSPA (AT&T High Speed Packet Access) is faster. Reality? So very many variables come into play (distance from site, obstructions between user and site, weather, network loading, backhaul traffic, ‘net traffic) that the tests are simply worthless.

It’s impossible to even generalize by market/city. Go with the provider with the coverage area, rate plan, and Terms of Use that best suit you. If you can’t bear to be offline, keep your voice provider on a different service and make sure you can tether your phone to use data if necessary (and that it won’t eat your lunch when the bill comes).