On Wednesday, Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. (GWS) continued its testing of the network performance of the four national wireless carriers throughout the various halls of the Moscone Center. GWS performed indoor testing using Rohde & Schwarz’s SwissQual Freerider platform connected to Samsung Galaxy S8 devices. The results provided insight into the stability of each network as they continued to serve the traffic load on the second day of the MWC Americas conference. And stable they were! In the seven years that GWS has been testing these shows, the results from Day 1 and Day 2 of this year’s show were the most consistent that we have ever seen.
Yet again all four networks were able to successfully complete all voice calls (all of the AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon calls were VoLTE). Sprint still exhibited the weakest audio quality throughout the North and South Halls. The West Hall saw the best voice service across all networks.
GWS transferred 12 GB of data while completing 2,300 tasks on Day 2 during the nearly three hour test of the conference halls. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile were able to successfully complete all tasks tested on their networks. Verizon experienced six task failures: three throughout the West Hall, two in South Hall near the Exhibitor Service Desk, and one in North Hall near the Rohde & Schwarz booth.
With the flood of traffic continuing on Wednesday, AT&T was able to retain its top speed position with average download throughputs remaining constant at 62 Mbps. For those of you in West Hall, AT&T boosted you to an average 82 Mbps (with fully half of all download tasks above 90 Mbps). Sprint improved ever so slightly to 50 Mbps, T-Mobile stayed at 48 Mbps, and Verizon was fixed at 39 Mbps. On the upload, AT&T again accelerated past the others on all fronts: Less than 1 second for a 2 MB selfie upload on Facebook and only 1.5 seconds for 4 MB video upload. That same video upload would take 2.4 seconds on Verizon, nearly 6 seconds on T-Mobile, and over 8 seconds on Sprint. AT&T provided the fastest latencies of around 45 msec, Sprint maintained its 55 msec from the prior day, while T-Mobile degraded from 55 to 75 msec. Verizon was still lagging far behind at 123 msec.
We put the numbers through GWS’s OneScore algorithm, which weighs and combines all of the various voice and data KPI results and provides a single score on a scale from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the best). Day 2 OneScore rankings for overall network performance, highest to lowest, were as follows: AT&T (9.70), T-Mobile (9.53), Verizon (9.51), and Sprint (9.14).
Check back tomorrow to get a final breakdown of mobile performance over the course of the MWCA conference.
