This past weekend I was in San Francisco enjoying the beautiful bay area but unfortunately I was not enjoying much 3G speed.  I traveled by car from Salt Lake City Utah to San Francisco so I decided I would to some tests on how AT&T’s network performed across the country.  I never really have any problems here in Utah, I travel around Utah a lot for work and have experienced the occasional dropped call, but overall pretty much anywhere I go I have service and more important I have good access to the 3G network.

Once I got to the town of Tooele here in Utah, I lost my 3G and my iphone switched over to edge, I had edge network until I got to Wendover, NV then I completely lost my data network.  From Wendover, NV to Reno, NV my edge network was pretty spotty, I had it for about 20% of the 400 miles of travel, pretty bad I thought.  Once I got to Reno I had full 3G, and did not notice it cut out until San Francisco.  While traveling around San Fran for the weekend, I was using my maps a lot to find restaurants and places I wanted to visit, just walking around I found so many 3G dead patches I felt like it was constantly switching between edge and 3G, I had very good cellular service but was not impressed with how I thought the data network should be in a big city.  I wondered though if it was the iphone so I asked a girl who had a Blackberry Bold if she ever experienced cutouts like that.  She lived in the area and claimed that she never noticed any cutouts like I was experiencing.

The moral of this story is if you are living in a big city and are concerned about data coverage do some research and find out which phones and service will give you the strongest coverage, I will mention again that I was very impressed with the cellular service because I never dropped a call or had low bars, even in buildings.  I wanted to ask a Verizon customer how they felt the 3G and cellular network was but I never had a chance to.  I will say this, I have done some tests here in Utah with the iPhone and Blackberry storm, and the AT&T 3G total kicks Verizons butt!  Most of the time I was doing downloads it was about twice as fast, so go Salt Lake City!

Here is the route I took, the red is the area where I lost the data network, the blue is where I only lost 3G.