Even Before iPhone, 3G Adoption Sharply Rose
News Brief. No thanks to the iPhone, U.S. 3G wireless subscribers exceed those in Europe. |
ComScore released the data today, for the three months ended June 30, about 11 days before Apple launched the iPhone 3G. So Apple's iPhone gets no credit for the U.S. surge, which was huge—80 percent growth compared with the same period a year earlier.
The percentage of U.S. mobile users that are 3G subscribers eked past Europe by 0.1 percent. There were 64 million mobile users with 3G devices in the United States at the end of June. That compares with 63.4 million subscribers in the five European countries ComScore tracked—France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Surely the addition of, say, Norway or Sweden would put us Yanks back where we belong. Behind.
The United States might finally be ahead, but don't shed tears for the Europeans. The 3G networks on the continent are much more mature. Here, we're stuck with AT&T's young and creaky network, and T-Mobile is just now bringing out 3G. The Europeans have sounder 3G networks.
The question: What will the numbers look like at the end of September? Apple's mobile is hugely successful and is sure to drive up the number of 3G subscribers. My family has three iPhone 3Gs, although I'm lamenting the ridiculous number of 3G telephony problems.
With all that 3G bandwidth, people should be able to consume lots of online content. But can they? I've been complaining about 3G performance in my apartment, so I moseyed on over to DSL Report's speed test for some eye-popping results.
- iPhone using 3G: 139K bps, 230K bps and 367K bps in three tests
- iPhone using EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution): 26K bps
- iPhone using Wi-Fi: 2684K bps, 2777K bps and 3160K bps
- Nokia E71 using 3G: 145K bps, 264K bps and 388K bps
The EDGE test took so long I couldn't bear to conduct it once. I had wondered why I was remembering dial-up to have been faster. Now why did I buy an iPhone 3G when Wi-Fi is the way fastest connection? I could have kept my iPhone.
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Comments (1)
Alternately, how about a netbook computer with Wi-Fi?
Then you could buy a "dumbphone" that's capable of making reliable voice phone calls.
Posted by JohnJ | September 5, 2008 11:04 AM