As much as I love my new HTC EVO 4G, so far I’ve been very disappointed with the so called 4G performance. I am going to run a series of tests randomly, right now, and post my results here so you will see what I mean.
Testing 3G – I used the www.speedtest.net app on the from the Android Marketplace. I’ve seen this number as high as 1.5Mbps but today I am getting 831kbps down and 295kbps up.
Testing 4G(local) -Speed testing while on 4G resulted in 2272kbps down and 370kbps up. Better? Yeah, sure, way better. Worth $10/mo to me? No way. It doesn’t make the phone any more usable to me as it sits. It’s also nowhere near the bandwidth that was promised.
Testing 4G(shared on hotspot) – Running speedtest.net on my iPod touch connected to my home wifi yields me a 4835kbps downstream and a 610kbps upstream. No, I don’t have the fastest internet out there but it’s NEVER gone down in 6 years and I have a static IP. Anyhow, this final statistic is the punchline of my whole blog posting… When I connect my iPod to the EVO in 4G hotspot mode, I get a whopping 168kbps downstream and a 248kbps upstream. I’ve repeated this test over and over again at different times of the day. This is actually the fastest speed I’ve gotten out of the mobile hotspot. Generally it has been under 100kbps. I tested this before and after 2.1-update1 was pushed out to me and the results were the same.
One last note here is that it is NOT possible to run a mobile hotspot on 3G. I find this extremely annoying since you can’t get 4G service everywhere. Presumably the coverage won’t be as good even when Sprint does fix the speed problems. This one poor decision on from Sprint means that this device currently cannot replace my Verizon Mifi. I am patiently hoping that the 4G improves dramatically and will report back when I actually obtain some acceptable speeds.
