AT&T Prepaid GoPhone Wireless SpeedTest Results – Part 1

I recently signed up for ATT’s Prepaid Wireless GoPhone service to do a review for smartphonematters. I am still working on a review but I’d thought I’d share some SpeedTest results. I compared the results with Straight Talk’s ATT network and it let to some interesting findings.

In this video, I’m going to look at some SpeedTest results for ATT’s Prepaid Wireless GoPhone service. We use SpeedTest to measure the speed, or performance of the cellular data / internet connection so we can see how fast the network is.

I started by running three tests on my Google Nexus 5 using the GoPhone SIM. I then set up the phone to use Straight Talk’s Prepaid ATT network so we can compare the results.

Here are the results for Nexus 5 using the GoPhone network and the Straight Talk ATT network.
Screenshot_2015-03-26-18-27-00

I did a little math to compare the results. I averaged the three test runs for GoPhone. The results were a download speed of 23.88 Mbps, an upload speed of 18.39 Mbps, and a Ping time of 52.33 milliseconds(ms).

I then averaged the Straight Talk ATT network tests. The results were a download speed of 22.34 Mbps, an upload speed of 7.51 Mbps, and a Ping time of 211.67 MS.

If we compare the two results, the GoPhone network download speed was 6.91% faster, the GoPhone upload speed was 145.03% faster, and the ping time was 75.28% shorter.
Nexus5avg

You’ll notice the ping times were shorter on the GoPhone network, Ping is a measure of latency, so a lower number is better.

Please note that this isn’t really scientific. Speed test results vary based on location and time of day. Some areas seems to have better network coverage and that is usually reflected in Speed Test results. Results also vary by time of day, which I suspect is really a matter of how many people are using the network at a given time. Late night and very early morning numbers seem higher than most times during the day.

In part 2 of this video, I’ll run the same tests using my iPhone 6 to see if we get similar results.