With the breaking of exclusivity between Apple and AT&T in the U.S., Verizon Wireless is now in the game with a CDMA compatible iPhone 4 on the market. With more carriers comes some strategy and careful planning as to which iPhone 4 on which carrier you choose from.
Due to the maturity and available features, District’s choice is AT&T.
Every time AT&T is mentioned as being superior over Verizon, there’s get a backlash of Verizon supporters claiming to know everything about dropped calls on AT&T, especially with the iPhone 4. But that just isn’t true, in most cases.
AT&T has a very fast and very robust network that they have been constantly upgrading and the influx of iPhone users grows rapidly on its network. Even in New York City, thought to be one of the worst places for an iPhone user, a District staffer only had 2 dropped calls in the four months that they lived there. New York City and the San Francisco area are the two cities in the U.S. that have the most iPhone users per capita. That can put a strain on any network, regardless of how robust the coverage is.
Features are a very important part of making any smartphone decision and some features are carrier and technology specific, making the decision a little more difficult. AT&T uses a wireless technology called GSM/UMTS while Verizon Wireless uses CDMA EVDO rev. 2.
The CDMA technology has been used across the world longer than GSM/UMTS making a very old technology. In some cases this would be an advantage; however, CDMA technology has seen very little improvement in recent years in terms of infrastructure and features giving GSM/UMTS the lead in innovation.
For example, the iPhone 4 on AT&T can make calls and surf the Internet at the same time, supports putting a call on hold, up to five people in a conference call, built-in settings for call forwarding, built-in settings for call waiting and built-in settings for caller ID.
On Verizon Wireless, only two people on a conference call is supported and you have to presend numbers to a phone number in order to enable or disable call forwarding, call waiting and caller ID. Most of the missing features on Verizon’s CDMA iPhone are because CDMA does not use a SIM card like AT&T and other GSM/UMTS carriers worldwide do.
Another big feature pertaining more to people that would like to use their phone outside of the U.S., carrier charges aside, is that with a GSM/UMTS phone you have the option to roam in more than 220 countries while Verizon’s CDMA iPhone can only roam in about 40 countries with most of Europe being off-limits.
Another significant decision-making detail to consider is network speed. District sat down and physically tested the speeds of two iPhone 4s side by side, Verizon vs. AT&T. First we turned off WiFi, and went outside to the park to avoid any electronic interference. We then downloaded Speedtest.net’s free network benchmark app, selected the same settings and ran the test four times at the same time on each phone. On the AT&T iPhone average download speeds were 4.13mb/s and average upload speeds were 1.61mb/s.
The Verizon iPhone didn’t do so well coming in at average speeds of 1.39 mb/s download and 496 kb/s upload. That is a very big difference in performance if you are a data-hungry iPhone user. But keep in mind that Verizon outperformed the AT&T iPhone on one of those speed tests.
All in all, Verizon should focus on its new 4G LTE network that it has yet to release any capable phones for three months into its launch. AT&T has worked very hard to make its network faster and more robust over the past four years and succeeded.
