Cricket is "10x faster than MetroPCS," according to the tag line of Leap Wireless' latest TV commercial for its Cricket brand. And the company has been eager to share results from an evaluation conducted last month by MobileNet Services Inc., which confirm the company's assertion that its data-download speeds were an order of magnitude faster than MetroPCS's when tested on two phones sold by both carriers, the LG Optimus and the Huawei Ascend.
On Cricket, the two phones averaged download speeds of about 1 megabit per second - comparable to the download speed you can expect, say, on a Verizon iPhone, according to wireless analyst Roger Entner of Boston's Recon Analytics. By contrast, MetroPCS's versions of the two phones averaged about 100 kilobits per second.
Case closed? Not completely - and therein lies a story about the rapid and confusing evolution of mobile-data technology. I'll explain more in a moment, but it boils down to this: A different test might have shown MetroPCS on top, at least in some places.
What the test showed. MobileNet designed the test according to Cricket's specifications, says Eugene Powell, vice president of the Irvine, Calif., engineering firm. It examined data speeds, upstream and downstream, around 80 cell sites across the Philadelphia region where the companies had comparable signal strength.
What explained the difference in data speeds? A difference in network technology.
On MetroPCS, the two phones operate on a version of CDMA technology known as 1xRTT. On Cricket, they operate on a later version of CDMA called EVDO - a system designed to complement CDMA voice transmission with higher-speed data.
Given the contrast, Powell acknowledges, the results were essentially a foregone conclusion. "It was exactly what we expected," he says.
