Novarum has released their
annual rankings of the top performing wireless metro-networks in North America. Verizon Wireless Broadband was top in terms of service availability, while Google's Mountain View wireless network topped the rankings overall. That's a huge improvement, considering the incessant
grumbling about network performance by locals last year.
One Zone by Toronto Hydro Telecom is still the top performing wireless broadband network by a wide margin, offering nearly double the speed of other networks.
The Speed metric is a weighted average of the download throughput and upload throughput of the network and gives an indication of the relative speed of the networks. Toronto Onezone averaged almost 3 megabits per second with a high power client. Eight of the top performers are Wi-Fi networks using enhanced clients - either high power or 802.11n. Verizon in Mountain View was a very good cellular service with a Speed rating higher than many Metro Wi-Fi networks.
Glenn Fleischman over at
Wi-Fi Networking News has a bit more detail on how the company gets its service rankings:
Novarum’s methodology involves taking a standard suite of clients that they can test from a set of 20 locations around a city, performing the same measures each time they re-test a city. They drive around, stop at specific locations chosen for particular purposes, and use a standard laptop 802.11g card, a newer but not fancy 802.11n adapter, a 300 mW laptop card with an external 5 dBi antenna mounted on the car from which they test, a Ruckus router, and various cell data modems, among other devices.
The company says that both incumbent 3G networks and citywide Wi-Fi networks showed significant improvements over last year's measurements -- though availability obviously remains metro-Wi-Fi's biggest problem, particularly when compared to 3G service. Tests showed both Sprint and Verizon's EVDO networks saw 20-30% speed bumps year over year.
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