iPhone 3GS data isn't really faster than the 3G's in Chicago

There's been talk the last couple days about the fact that there really isn't anywhere in the States to take advantage of the blazing 7.2Mbps downlink connection supported by the iPhone 3GS -- except for one great hope, one diamond in the rough that could become a shining destination for 3GS owners the world over. That destination would be Chicago, where AT&T fired up 7.2Mbps trials late last year, and the hope was that they might be letting lay folk (like us) in on the action in time for the 3GS release. Well, we've been running side-by-side tests today, and the short answer is that we're clearly not accessing 7.2 -- granted, the 3GS is getting marginally faster speeds both up and down, but we figure this can easily be attributed to the new model's faster processor because a doubling of the downlink pipe simply doesn't account for a 100kbps bump in speed (latency was all over the map on both phones, for the record). If you're holding out on upgrading from a 3G to a 3GS, go ahead and crack a smile -- because for now, anyway, this is one spec bump that means precisely zilch in the real world.

[Erb @ Jun 20th 2009 10:21AM]

It's exactly 927 milliseconds faster. (Not including transfer speed) :D

[Glenn Tobey @ Jun 20th 2009 10:25AM]

Exactly!! The latency is by far much better, instead of taking one second for a packet to get from point A to point B it takes 1/10th.

[Chris Ziegler @ Jun 20th 2009 10:26AM]

Latency was all over the map in our testing on both devices - concentrate on the uplink and downlink.

[theone3 @ Jun 20th 2009 10:35AM]

Yeah. Did you notice the download test was only 130kb? I wonder how quickly a larger file would transfer.

[Chris Ziegler @ Jun 20th 2009 10:39AM]

@theone3: It actually runs a battery of six tests of varying download sizes.

[webran61 @ Jun 20th 2009 10:41AM]

Alright, how many people want to move to Chicago with me?

Let's start a revolution people, come on!

Give me 7.2Mbps or give me...

...

[Bob @ Jun 20th 2009 10:56AM]

It comes down to one thing - cheap a$$e$. The reason it's not faster is because it's still the same speed *wireline* pipe between the same number of people, or maybe even more. They can upgrade the wireless equipment to 7.2 meg all they want, but as I have said before, until they put more (or faster) wired connections to the towers, you won't notice an increase. AT&T doesn't want to spend more money putting T1's or T3's to these towers, that is why they introduced the "automatic Wi-Fi connection" stuff, so you spend more of your time on cheaper (or free for AT &T if you are connected to your Wi-Fi at home) shared DSL or cable lines as opposed to having to run more (or faster) data connections to the towers. God forbid AT&T have to spend more money on infrastructure to support the mobile data users that pay $30 a month for usage - the same (or more) than they pay at home for UNLIMITED usage for MULTIPLE devices.

[pedro @ Jun 20th 2009 11:15AM]

Shame about the latency. Did you do any tests right next to a tower? The UK government states that it drops off very quickly and that is why we will have to pay a 50p a month cable tax :(

[Daza @ Jun 20th 2009 11:37AM]

Did none of you read the bit that says "latency was all over the map on both phones, for the record" ?

[Cris T @ Jun 20th 2009 11:43AM]

Are you F****** kidding me? I am on Long Island (Nassau County, NY) and I see a HUGE difference in 3G vs. 3G S speeds here. I have about 2-3 times faster on the 3G S than on the 3G.

[Penguin @ Jun 20th 2009 12:19PM]

Paul A. Chapel: I don't think you really have any idea what you are talking about. 4GB isn't all that much. My 4 year old laptop has that much. And upgrading a pc every couple of months? I haven't upgraded my desktop in a while and it still will play every new game on the market at medium-high settings.

[darkmax @ Jun 20th 2009 12:34PM]

yaw...yay...

[jeremy480 @ Jun 20th 2009 1:31PM]

@Chris T: That's just the placebo effect kicking in...

[DWells55 @ Jun 21st 2009 1:46PM]

140ms ping is good enough for tethered gaming. Hell, I played Halo 3 tethered to a Blackberry on Verizon back in '07 when my campus still didn't have internet capable of gaming. It actually worked well enough to be playable in small games. Setup was easy enough, tether Blackberry over USB, then bridge USB and Ethernet, plug the Xbox into laptop while set to DHCP, good to go.

[DWells55 @ Jun 22nd 2009 1:44AM]

It's not a placebo effect, it's that the faster processor and increased RAM significantly decrease page rendering time which is then perceived by the user as decreased load time.

[Dafrety @ Jun 20th 2009 10:22AM]

So much for that, then.

[dennis @ Jun 20th 2009 10:48AM]

As if that's some kind of big surprise or something.

[Kinger @ Jun 20th 2009 10:22AM]

people will still buy it

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 10:27AM]

I think this falls in the realm of future proofing. People like to buy new gadgets that take advantage of technology that isn't popular yet. I remember having a gigabit ethernet card years before they became popular for the same reason.

[Kyle @ Jun 20th 2009 10:37AM]

If you're upgrading its kind of a waste. But for someone like me who's dropping a BB for it its a good phone.

[Kinger @ Jun 20th 2009 10:45AM]

What Apple really should have done was call it something else (like iPhone Video or something else related to a new feature) instead of 'Speed' to save them from this kind of humiliation..

[Matt @ Jun 20th 2009 11:01AM]

There is no future-proofing as far as technology is concerned, only going obsolete later rather than sooner, but paying a hell of a lot more to be "non-obsolete".

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 11:10AM]

Nah, I just got 4 gigabytes on my new iMac. I don't expect that to be considered a paltry amount of RAM at least for three years, give or take a few months. That's future proofing. With Snow Leopard, the hardware I got is going to feel completely new when it comes out.

[John @ Jun 20th 2009 11:41AM]

A gigabit network card is still unnecessary for most people. 100M is quite good enough to stream 1080p over a network and not many people actually have gigabit routers or switches. With regards to RAM, unless you have a quad core processor then you're more likely to be CPU bound than memory bound for most things.

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 11:49AM]

I don't know about that. RAM just lets you have more space to have apps open and frees up the hard drive from serving up virtual RAM space, which will slow a computer down, so I'm apt to err on having as much RAM as possible. Also, Snow Leopard is supposed to offload a lot of CPU processing to the graphic card, rather than let it sit idle for just graphics intensive stuff like games. So we shouldn't be limited by just processor speed in the not so distant future.

[OddManOut @ Jun 20th 2009 11:53AM]

"I don't expect that to be considered a paltry amount of RAM at least for three years, give or take a few months. That's future proofing. With Snow Leopard, the hardware I got is going to feel completely new when it comes out."

4GB ? I dunno if 'paltry' is the word. Standard....mediocre...average...THOSE are probably the words I'd use. Thanks to Vista's gluttonous appetite for RAM 4GB certainly isn't going to impress anyone these days...

Of course, with Win 7 dropping in the fall, I think we're going to finally see some strides forward in the move to general 64-bit processing, which opens the flood gates as far as RAM is concerned. And with DDR3 stepping down into the main stream, I'd say within 1 year of Win 7's launch, 6GB of RAM will be standard for anything but low end systems and netbooks, with 8GB and 12GB fairly common as well.

Then again if YOU personally are still running the same os on your iMac that you are now (or at least will be shortly) 1 - 3 years from now it won't make any difference how much RAM anyone else has, your system should work just as well as ever.

But as far as future proofing for a phone, particularly something *trendy* like an iPhone, what's the point ? Why future proof a device that you replace every 12 - 18 months anyway ? By the time you can say, 'Cool, now the network speed has finally caught up to my phone, I sure am glad I paid the extra and got the high end model last year so I can take advantage of it...' you'll already be about to buy the NEXT one anyway.

You can do it of course, but it kinda seems like a null advantage to me...

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 12:03PM]

I've had my current flip phone for three years and don't plan on getting rid of it unless it breaks. I'm a gadget lover, but I'm not a geeky gadget lover who needs the latest things immediately. And since I've pretty much switched completely from PCs at this point, I don't anticipate that the RAM is going to go obsolete on a Mac as quickly as it does in a PC environment.

When I had a PC, I was literally buying a new video card and more RAM every six months because the gaming market is set up to produce games that don't work on current hardware (Crysis as an example). It's set up that way so that people are always upgrading. Of course, the only company that doesn't do that is Valve, which is why I kind of scaled back my gaming fetish and stuck with their stuff exclusively. Part of the beauty of Steam is it gives the people at Valve a measure of what kind of hardware people are actually using, which is why they have surveys so much.

Not pushing the envelope with graphics lets Valve focus much more on the gameplay, which I think has worked out for them very well. In fact, I really didn't "switch" to my Mac completely until I was sure I could play all the Valve games. Crossover by CodeWeavers made that possible, God bless them.

[GingerFox @ Jun 20th 2009 12:46PM]

@Oddmanout.

Are you an idiot? i am sick to death of all this vista bashing, learn or use it before you comment, my vista machine very rarely uses more than 1.5GB (i have 4GB) so i highly doubt it has 'gluttonous appetite for RAM 4GB'.

and god help it but i kinda agree with paul about future proofing, 4GB is gona be fine for a least a few years i reckon.

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 12:55PM]

@GingerFox

You can still get by with 1 GB of RAM on a Mac with Leopard and XP. I don't know about Vista because I dropped that OS like a hot potato, but when Apple finally upgraded the iMacs to 4 gigabytes, I rushed in because that's more than twice than what you need to be comfortable with Leopard and it will probably be at least three times what you need with Snow Leopard.

I like the philosophy that Apple makes their OS FASTER with each release. I wish it was that way with Windows. If it was, I would probably still be on a PC.

[superhobo @ Jun 20th 2009 12:55PM]

OddManOut:

"I'd say within 1 year of Win 7's launch, 6GB of RAM will be standard for anything but low end systems and netbooks, with 8GB and 12GB fairly common as well."

That...shows you:
a) Are a dumbass.
b) Don't know anything about Windows 7.
c) Both.

Windows 7 is usable even on 512MB for basic tasks. 1GB is enough for most people who'll only be chatting it up on farcebook and stuff.

[BigD145 @ Jun 20th 2009 1:27PM]

The 3G S is already obsolete. It was obsolete before the 3G even came out. Future-proof, my ass.

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 1:28PM]

@OddManOut

Dude, I feel bad that you're getting flamed for not making sheep-like comments about Microsoft and Vista, but that's the way those Apple Haters are. Don't feel bad about telling the truth. I've experienced it quite a few times when making honest statements about Windows.

You have a right to your opinion. Don't forget that.

[Shyam D @ Jun 20th 2009 1:54PM]

Paul, Honest and Truth are not mutually inclusive. An honest statement is merely one that YOU believe in. A truthful statement is a fact. Vista did initially suck on 1GB of ram, but it runs fine now on 1GB of ram. The same way Leopard was not fun initially on anything less then 1 GB of ram.

You really shouldn't talk about sheep-like comments. Show me one post where you have said even one marginally negative thing about an Apple product. I bet you out of the thousands of posts you have on engadget, there is not one.

[Paul a. Chapel @ Jun 20th 2009 1:58PM]

Thank you Mr. College Professor.

[Al @ Jun 20th 2009 10:23AM]

Like I said before the Iphone is like a Ferrari in mud ; they need to cut ties with At&t and go to a real network.

[Beastage @ Jun 20th 2009 10:27AM]

Is there a real network in the US? from what I gather they are all bad.

The US is suffering from some really bad mobile and even wired internet solutions.

[Bob @ Jun 20th 2009 10:58AM]

That's because they are too cheap to upgrade the speed on the backhaul connections, like I posted above.

[sweet greggo @ Jun 20th 2009 11:43AM]

Sprint has the fastest network, but it's on the brink of going under.

[Cy Starkman @ Jun 21st 2009 1:03AM]

The iPhone does have a real network. It's called australia. 7.2 is old news, the latest theoretical peak is 21mbit on 3G (theories!)

Actually the notion that everyone is the world is headed for Chicago is bizzare. Rather the rest of the world is doing quite well thankyou and wondering when all the americans are going to try and leave thier country due to the failing network.

So imagine that! Apple HTC and friends could release phones right now with 21mbit down. Imagine the gnashing of teeth from the USA then!

Well except for the Pre which pretty much can only run in the USA and a couple of Asian nations on it's speedy 2mbit wireless broadband standard.

[Jetblakc @ Jun 21st 2009 4:24PM]

Leave our country because of network speed? You must have better herb in Australia too.

[Jetblakc @ Jun 21st 2009 4:24PM]

Leave our country because of network speed? You must have better herb in Australia too.

[RandyFD @ Jun 20th 2009 10:23AM]

You better duck, a fanboy shitstorm is coming.

[Kevin @ Jun 20th 2009 10:39AM]

Proud of yourself?

[Beastage @ Jun 20th 2009 10:26AM]

lol america and their mobile internet.... if you can't do at least 2mbit on 3.6mbit tech you can't expect to do more on a 7.2mbit tech .

[Bob @ Jun 20th 2009 10:59AM]

Yeah Beastage, because Americans CHOOSE to have mobile companies that won't spend crap on infrastructure.

[Beastage @ Jun 20th 2009 11:31AM]

I will argue that yes, lack of smart consumerism simply makes it much more profitable for these corporates to do what ever they want.

[Lamp @ Jun 20th 2009 12:13PM]

Yea, isn't that exactly what the free market is supposed to accomplish?
Oh well.

[Uncle Sam @ Jun 20th 2009 1:29PM]

Don't be jealous Beastage just because you can't live in the greatest country in the world, hell, the universe! Why does everyone have the bash the best things? Like the U.S., the iPhone, Family Guy, etc...

[Jonathan @ Jun 20th 2009 8:46PM]

So I lack smart consumerism because I have a data plan? I should not use any cellphone service to show the carriers that I want better cellphone service?

That's fun in theory, but I need a phone. There's nothing we can do but complain, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

[MRCUR @ Jun 20th 2009 10:27AM]

I'm not sure why anyone would be expecting their iPhone 3G S to get the 7.2 speeds... AT&T literally just announced that they would be deploying 7.2 right before the iPhone announcement...