T-Mobile has issued a challenge to folks living in the city of Seattle. If you can prove that your iPhone, whether it be on AT&T or Verizon’s network, can get a faster download speed than a Samsung Galaxy S 4G in two out of three tests, then you’ll get $1,000. There are 10 stores participating, so see the poster above to find out which one is closest to you. The contest is valid between Friday the 29th of April and Sunday the first of May. Now what does this marketing campaign say about T-Mobile? First, they don’t care that AT&T is trying to buy them, they still think they have the best network out there and are prepared to slam the competition. Second, they’re so confident with their HSPA+ network and the ST-Ericsson modem inside the Galaxy S 4G that they’re putting their money where their mouth is. Third, just because they don’t have the iPhone doesn’t mean they have a poor smartphone portfolio, and if you’ve been keeping on top of Apple rumors then you’ll know that there’s an iPhone being tested right now that can support T-Mobile’s network.
If you and your friends want to try and really win this, then you should have someone standing outside the T-Mobile store with a USB modem that’s fully capable of 21 Mbps speeds plugged into a laptop torrenting several Linux ISO images. If that doesn’t saturate a cell tower, then we don’t know what will. In all seriousness though, while T-Mobile does deserve to be commended for this marketing campaign, the amount of devices on the market that can take advantage of their network is so small that you can count them on one hand. Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad thing. They’ll be more 21 Mbps capable smartphones coming out this year than freak show combination CDMA-LTE devices for Verizon and CDMA-WiMAX devices for Sprint. As for AT&T … they’re in the process of upgrading their network, but the iPhone is limited to 7.2 Mbps download speeds anyway.
[Original image of the poster is here for those who are visually challenged or those that want to read the legal disclaimer]