Long before the iPhone circus started, analysts and tech enthusiasts were complaining about the wireless network chosen to connect the new device to the Internet, AT&T's EDGE Network. The Wall Street Journal review called the network "pokey," while the New York Times review termed it "excruciatingly slow."
The people over at Broadband Reports (BBR) have now put some real numbers behind those complaints: 5805 iPhone users have now used the BBR's online iPhone/EDGE speed test, and the results ain't pretty.
The main finding of the test is that EDGE really is a relatively slow wireless network in terms of bandwidth. The 5805 iPhone users who took the speed test were getting an average download speed of 109 kilobits per second (Kbps) on the EDGE network. EV-DO wireless networks consistantly deliver between 400 Kbps to 700 Kbps download speeds, with bursts up to 2 megabits per second (Mbps). Your broadband connection at home is likely to be in the 1 Mbps range, or about 10 times the speed of EDGE. AT&T's more advanced 3G wireless network is also capable of delivering download speeds of around 1 Mbps.
BBR's speed test also reveals high levels of "latency" in the EDGE network. Latency is a measure, in milliseconds, of how long it takes a single small packet of data to travel from the iPhone through the network to a target location on the Web (a Yahoo server, for example) and back again. Mind you, that's before the network actually starts sending data down.
Anyway, the speed test shows that even for the smallest data request, iPhone users can expect 500 milliseconds of latency no matter how close they are to the server they're trying to access.
EDGE's high latency times and narrow bandwidth add up to painfully long page loads for iPhone users. So why did Apple and AT&T choose EDGE and not the AT&T 3G network for the iPhone? Because EDGE covers 90 percent of the country, while the 3G network covers just a few markets. Until AT&T builds out its 3G network to reach the rest of us, the iPhone will remain a 21st century device running on a 20th century network. Too bad.
