3G performance varies greatly by geography
iPhone app finds iPhone users run Xtreme Labs’ Speedtest millions of times, generating database.
Xtreme Labs’ Speedtest software measures download and upload speeds on an iPhone, whether the data connection uses an Edge, 3G of Wi-Fi network.
Since it became available in August 2008, Speedtest was downloaded over a million times. Users run the speed test in more than 150 countries, and 10 terabytes of data were sent to make measurements.
Through the backend application, Xtreme Labs has been building a database which provides a picture of wireless network performance by geography and carrier. "Now we know which wireless data service in a particular country is reliable and fast," said Sahand Sojoodi, principal at Xtreme Labs, in the news release .
For instance, the company found that in the US and in the UK, the average download speed is below the worldwide average, while Japan and Canada are positioned well above.
Ray Sharma, Chairman of Xtreme Labs, provides some of the gathered statistics in a blog post on the company’s website: the average measured 3G download speed was 841 Kbps in the US, 663 Kbps in the UK, 1,213 Kbps in Japan and 1,314 Kbps in Canada. On the lower end, the average download speed was 442 Kbps in the Russian Federation.
Xtreme Labs found a worldwide 3G average speed of 956Kbps for download and 153 Kbps for upload. For Edge networks, the average speed was 218 Kbps for download and 37 Kbps for upload. Latency was 484 ms on average for 3G and 907 ms for Edge.
Xtreme Labs recently released new versions of its Speedtest software for Android and Blackberry handsets.
By Annabelle Bouard