IPhones trail Samsung, Google devices in Internet speeds
san francisco — If you paid top dollar for the iPhone X and Apple’s other flagship smartphones expecting the fastest mobile Internet speeds around, you won’t like these results.
Apple’s iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and $1,000 iPhone X trail the latest smartphones from Samsung Electronics Co and Alphabet’s Google in download speeds, according to data from Ookla, a company that provides the most popular online service for measuring the speed of an Internet connection with its Speedtest app and Website.
Ookla’s data are important because they are created by users — not in a corporate lab — and encompass the range of random real-world conditions that affect performance like distance from cellular towers and network congestion. Ookla said it hosts millions of tests a day and has done 20 billion in total.
To be sure, it can be difficult for users to tell the differences between how fast pages load on a phone. But it’s easier to sense the quality of video, how long it takes to pull up a song and how long it takes to send an email. Web speeds aren’t the only important device speed metric. Apple’s main processors that control the speed of launching apps, swiping through PDFs and loading games are often recognised as some of the fastest in the industry.
“With both LTE-Advanced speeds and Apple’s custom-designed A11 Bionic, the smartest and most powerful chip ever in a smartphone, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X provide an incredibly fast wireless experience that can easily handle today’s most demanding tasks,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. “With up to 27 LTE bands, more than any other smartphone in the world, these iPhones also provide the best worldwide LTE coverage.”
The speed-test data, reviewed by Bloomberg, show that Samsung’s Galaxy S9 phones had an average download speed — across carriers in the US — of 38.9 megabits per second, based on about 102,000 tests over the past three months. The larger model, the S9+, delivered speeds of 38.4 Mbps, according to a sample size of about 169,000 phone connections. The iPhone X on average downloaded data at 29.7 Mbps, based on a 603,000 tests. The iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 8 were close behind with speeds of 29.4 Mbps and 28.6 Mbps, respectively.