It has come to our attention that the iPhone, while very capable, lacks Flash or Java, so it cannot use any of the many "speed test" programs out there. For your iPhone amusement, here is a little speed test page that will work on your iPhone browser: tinyspeedtest.html. (Our older text.dslreports.com/mspeed test also works, although it is more of a hack).

As expected, results show the EDGE network has very poor latency (around 500ms) for tiny requests. Our older mobile speed test shows iPhones on the AT&T subnet logging between 45kbit and 175kbit (average just over 100kbit) but with even higher full page request latencies - over a second.

Wifi connected iphones are logging PC/Mac-like speeds on this and other speed tests.

The high latency of EDGE is why even graphics-lite but function rich sites take a long time to load fully. During loading, the anemic EDGE capacity is rarely totally utilized. Instead, the phone spends a lot of time waiting around for EDGE to recognize yet another small request is pending (even just to check a timestamp on a graphic or CSS or js file), and carry back the small answer.

AT&T EDGE at even a very conservative 64kbit speed would have been quite adequate for even complex web pages if married to reasonable latency.

Supporting data for this article: 5800 samples of iphone users testing speed using our original "mobile speed test". "dwn" is in kilobits per second. The AT&T data network is at least 32.x.x.x

select avg(dwn),avg(latency),count(*) from
        mobile_result,x2id where x2id.id=mobile_result.uaid
        and mid>1633213 and
        x2id.k like '%iphone%' and ip like '32.%';
+----------+-----------------+----------+
| avg(dwn) | avg(latency)    | count(*) |
+----------+-----------------+----------+
| 109.2486 | 1.2144346246334 |     5805 |
+----------+-----------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.71 sec)

Feel free to post the results your iPhone manages to get on this new speedtest, tinyspeedtest.html.