The geeks are descending onto Moscone West this morning, and some of them have iPhones unlocked to run on T-Mobile’s network. As you may recall, T-Mobile announced that they’ve installed a microCell tower inside the Moscone West building for Apple’s WWDC conference this week, which has T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network running on the iPhone-compatible 1900 MHz spectrum.
PC Magazine’s Sascha Segan has three iPhones running on three different networks at WWDC, including one unlocked for T-Mobile. Segan ran multiple speed tests on the three different devices from inside the Moscone Center, giving us a glimpse of what we may expect to see when it comes to iPhone data speeds on T-Mobile’s network. As expected, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ was faster than the iPhone running on Verizon’s 3G network, though it fell far behind the speeds on AT&T’s variant.
Tests this early in the game obviously aren’t always 100% accurate, though these informal speed tests give a glimpse as to what we could see when T-Mobile refarms its 1900 MHz spectrum from EDGE to HSPA+, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year. T-Mobile has often stated that it needs the iPhone to help it stop bleeding customers to other networks, and a refarmed 1900 MHz network will finally be able to enjoy HSPA+ speeds on T-Mobile’s network, just in time for Apple to unleash an LTE variant of the iPhone, set for later this year.
[via PC Magazine]