Over on the MacRumors forums, they’re comparing their recent iPhone upload speeds and they’re not happy. Per The Unofficial Apple Weblog, users are experiencing uploads that appear to be capped at 100 kbps rather than the 1.6mbps that was a previous norm. Users have been comparing rates captured with tools like Speedtest.net’s Speed Test to put concrete numbers on perceived performance drops and it looks like that drop is huge, compared to the way things were just a week or two ago.
According to the thread, affected cities include: New York City, Central Jersey, Boston, Orlando, Seattle, South Jersey/Philly, Columbus, Cleveland, West Houston, Phoenix, Northern Colorado, St. Paul/Minnesota, Suffolk County/Long Island, Quad Cities, South Jersey, Denver, Detroit Metro, and Cincinnati.
TUAW ran a test in Denver, using SpeedTest.net’s application as well as FCC Mobile Broadband Test and iNetQCheck and experienced similar numbers as the ones reported in the MacRumors forum, with several stray data points in iNetQCheck runs — but even those remained below 200 kbps. This stands as a huge difference from the upload speeds reported just a week or two ago where a user test demonstrated upload speeds up to 3.5 mbps.
Wireless carrier AT&T has yet to offer an official comment due to the holiday and a recent guess has stated that the hypothetical upload caps may be a consequence of holiday weekend infrastructure work, and that speeds may return to normal tomorrow.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available and if you’ve seen this on your end, please let us know.
4 replies on “Rumor: AT&T may be capping iPhone upload speeds”
Good to see my hard-earned money being used to screw me.
The network has to be slower due to all the 3G Kindle and 3G nook users who connect via AT&T for free. Aren't these devices sapping bandwidth??
Cable and DSL home carriers tend to 'cap' upload speeds (usually about 1Mbps) to divert bandwidth to downloads.
Yes the net work is mouch slower and I'm on edge in nc and I called AT&T and the man I talk to sad that network on the east cost was not working for the iPhone 4