Let's get this straight right away: We didn't test dropped voice calls, we didn't test customer service, and we didn't test map coverage by wandering around in the boonies. We tested the ability of the networks to deliver 3G data in and around cities, including both concrete canyons and picket-fenced 'burbs. And while every 3G network gave us troubles on occasion, AT&T's wasn't measurably more or less reliable than Verizon's.

It was measurably faster, however, download-wise, in 6 of the 12 markets where we tested, and held a significantly higher national average than the other carriers. Only Verizon came close, winning 4 of the 12 markets. For downloads, AT&T and Verizon came in first or second in nine markets, and in whatever location we tested, both AT&T and Verizon 3G were consistently present. If you're wondering about upload speeds, AT&T swept the contest, winning 12 for 12.

The Cities

Last year, we did an 8-city coast-to-coast test, and called Sprint the big winner. This year, we have results from 11 cities coast-to-coast, and even got to test (during what was otherwise vacation time) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Also, unlike last year, we were able to test T-Mobile's new 3G network, active in all the markets we visited (except, at the time, Maui). For being such a latecomer, T-Mo did well, and the numbers show even more promise from them.

We tried to spread the love around this year, geographically, hitting cities we didn't get to last year (at the cost of losing a few from '08). Besides Maui, we hit Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco/Bay Area and Tampa.

The Methodology

Our testing regimen was based on the same scheme as last year: We picked five locations in each city, including at least one "downtown" location that was considered a suburb. The selections were arbitrary, or fixed but logical—landmarks, residences, etc. (Note: Due to timing constraints, Chicago and Maui only had three test locations.)

Our hardware consisted of two identical stripped-down Acer Timeline laptops running Windows Vista, and four 3G wireless modems requested from the carriers. We allowed them to make the choice of hardware, simply asking for their "best performing" model. Once up and running, here are the tests we ran:

• Bandwidth & Latency: Speedtest.net - Reports upload and download bandwidth in megabits per second, as well as ping latency in milliseconds. We performed this test five times at each location on each modem.

• Pageload: Hubble images at Wikimedia - A 4.42MB web page with 200 4KB thumbnails, it was fully reloaded three times, and timed using the Firefox plug-in YSlow. The three time readings were averaged.

• Download: Wikimedia's Abell 2667 galaxy cluster photo - This single 7.48MB JPEG is a clear test of how fast you can download stuff from the cloud, and again, we hard refreshed this file three times, and measured time using YSlow for an accurate human-error-free reading.

This was a test of 3G performance. Even though Sprint and its tech partner Clearwire have intrepidly released 4G networks in half of the tested markets—Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Maui, Portland and Seattle—we only tested Sprint's 3G network. The reason should be obvious: While we performed the test with laptop cards on PCs, it's supposed to serve as a test of the network's ability to deliver service to all devices, including smartphones, dumbphones and laptops. Show us a Palm Pre WiMax edition—better yet, sell 100,000 of them—and then we'll switch it up. And while you may argue that this 3G test still doesn't adequately reflect your experience with your iPhone, at least it's the same network, and may serve to rule out AT&T's data pipe as the independent cause for all those infamous dropped calls.

(On a side note, when multiple carriers release 4G networks, we'll definitely conduct a comparative test of them all, using new parameters, and focused around laptop use.)

The Results

Now that you know how we ran the test, here are the top finishers in each market, plus some pretty bar graphs showing you how bandwidth compares.

Though we tested for uploads and downloads, we focused our additional tests on the downstream, as it's the more important direction, in the minds of most consumers and most carriers. The anomaly there is AT&T, which has dramatically good upload bandwidth, even when its download bandwidth doesn't keep up. Fast uploads are a priority for AT&T, and will soon be for T-Mobile, which recently turned on faster uploading in NYC, which you can see in our test results. Meanwhile, although Verizon technically came in second in uploads as well as downloads, it doesn't seem to treat this as a major priority.

When it came to downloads, though, the competition was markedly stiffer:

Atlanta - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Bay Area/San Francisco - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Chicago - AT&T, followed by Verizon then Sprint
Denver - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Las Vegas - Verizon, followed by AT&T
Los Angeles - AT&T, followed by Sprint
Maui - Verizon, followed by AT&T
New York - AT&T, followed by T-Mobile
Phoenix - Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Portland - T-Mobile, followed by Verizon
Seattle - Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Tampa - Sprint, followed by AT&T

Is That The End?

No. We've compiled the following gallery with all the data from each test location in the 12 markets, so you can see on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level who won what. This also includes latency, pageload and download numbers, so you can track the performance in several ways. (The data above is bandwidth, though as you'll see, that was generally representative of the overall performance. If a carrier was tops in bandwidth, it was usually tops in download time.) These tests are all just "snapshots in time," as the carriers like to say, so feel free to bitch about where your experience doesn't reflect our results. We stand by them, but acknowledge that network performance is changing all the time, and experiences very regular hiccups.

Regarding latency, you'll notice it didn't appear to affect actual user experience—3G isn't really up for Modern Warfare 2, if that's what you're thinking—we will gladly show you latency averages, as well as pageload and file download averages, broken out for every market on the test.

Special thanks to all of the excellent testers we enlisted, Mark Wilson, Chris Mascari, John Herrman, Kyle VanHemert, Dan Nosowitz, Matt Buchanan and Rosa Golijan from our own team, along with Tamara Chadima and the indefatigable Dennis Tarwood. You guys were troopers, and I'm pretty sure FedEx either loves you or hates you. Thanks to John Mahoney for helping develop the initial tests that we've continually refined, to Chris Jacob for mapping all the locations, and to Don Nguyen for the mad number crunching—you truly are a spreadsheet pimp.

Note: Some of you may have noticed that San Diego is among the cities highlighted on the top illustration—and that Maui is not. The reason is that while we did testing in three great San Diego locations, one of the locations didn't get any Sprint or T-Mobile service, and the already fairly thin dataset was rendered too compromised for any kind of usable report. As for Maui's absence, Maui's just too far out in the Pacific to make for a pretty map shot.

The 30-meter (98.4-foot) mirror will be composed of 492 segments and, according to the experts, it is destined to dwarf Hubble in many regards. When it's finalized nine years from now, it will be the largest telescope in the world. At least until the 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope comes online.

Oh, those astronomers and their toys. [TMT via Wired]

Hawaii took the DTV plunge this past Thursday at noon, broadcasting a message with a looped announcement and a help line the legions of confused islanders could call. As expected, pretty much nobody understands what's actually going on, and many have left off buying a converter box until they were forced to do so. Angry phone calls streamed in about missing primetime Thursday shows like Grey's Anatomy (ugh.) and CSI (double ugh.). But why did Hawaii choose to go digital a full month before the original proposed date?

Turns out the endangered Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel, a small nesting bird, was the deciding factor in the change. The analog transmission towers on the slopes of Maui's Haleakala volcano obstruct their nesting grounds, and tearing them down before the birds' mating season is an attempt to buck up the dwindling population.

The story seems like a Carl Hiaasen subplot and unfortunately I don't think we can promise such entertaining stories from the nationwide transition. But with any luck, it'll be a little bit smoother. [Yahoo!]

I was in Hawaii and it was terrific. I swam with a whale shark, took my first surf lessons, hung out with Lisa's family and ate a lot of great food. I did work a few days at the start, and checked a lot of email on the iPhone, which got terrific 3G across both Oahu and Maui, much better than I get in SF. I also got some quality time in with a new waterproof camera and I did not lose it scrambling away from killer waves or imaginary sharks (for once). I also got some quality time in with the Kindle and thanks to its unique properties, finished about 1000 pages of book at blog reading speeds. More on those later. For now, I'll just say it's nice to be home.

I took everyone's advice and didn't bring a smartphone, using a regular cellphone only once or twice a day. All I wanted to do was sit on the beach and swim out as far into the Pacific as I'd brave. Did I miss Gizmodo and my phones and TVs and whizzy wigs? Yep, a lot. Then again, I did run into a lot of gadgets I'd probably have never seen during my mainland life.

Lisa's uncle and aunt hosted us for the more meaningful part of the trip. He's an old ex-hippie/yogi guy who is spacey and down to earth at the same time. Lisa's aunt grew up in Tokyo and Hong Kong and decided she'd end up in Hawaii after watching Elvis's Blue Hawaii.

In their house were two outstandingly weird gadgets.
Biomodulator
The first was the biomodulator. It is a medical device that "sends electrical jolts through your meridian points in the body using 7 frequencies of electrical current to jolt your cellular membrane into being charged." It is supposed to help with pain and overall health. I tried it. It felt like I had a battery hooked up to my neck and can confirm the different tingly sensations coming from the device, which looks like a Russian-built tricorder. It is also FDA approved to reduce pain, which a doctor (Doctor Arn who runs Macrumors; really, he's an MD when not running the site) that the simple concept here is technically called Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation. In some tests, placebos were more effective, according to Wikipedia, but I met plenty of people on the island who said it had helped them. Who knows. I can't confirm or deny that it works.

Annie and Rick live in a really weird and wonderful Japanese-styled house near Diamondhead on Oahu, with an open courtyard in the center, sliding doors with rice paper shades, and massive massive open floor. There was a TV, and some computers, but this is not a nerd's house. Not in the typical sense, anyhow.

Total Shield
Behind a painting in a corner of a room, I spied some red and green flickering, looking closer, I found this PVC pipe with LEDs and a switch and a label that read "Total Shield." As well as a description that goes something like this:

This is a multipurpose unit designed to neutralize EMF's and/or Geopathic Stress. For EMF protection it produces a 7.83 Hz field (Schumann Resonance) which blankets a 20,000 sq. ft. area. This has the effect of overcoming the negative EMF fields. For Geopathic Stess the unit detects and then amplifies the waves REVERSING in phase by 180 degrees and retransmitting them which has the effect of neutralizing them (similar to noise cancellation technology).

Zara Alpha Swim Fins
Zelda. That's what I thought of when I saw Annie's swim fins. We were swimming out to a flag about a quarter mile out off Kaimana beach, a local spot at the top of Waikiki. I was not drowning, but I wasn't really swimming very well, either, and Rick and Annie could tell. Being older but being very fit from swimming in the ocean every day, Annie lent me her fins. These were remarkable in the way that they were smaller and shaped in a way that suggested they were hydrodynamic in the way that rectangular fins aren't. Well, I am not sleeping with the fishes, so I guess they work pretty well. Bonus: they don't tend to tweak your ankles like normal fins.

So about that cellphone. I admit, it was a Sony Ericsson W880i, and it did have Gmail apps on it, so I was checking personal email once in a while when no one was looking. But having to click through 4 levels to get to my inbox was a bit of a deterrent, if that makes me a little more innocent.

The PowerKayak comes in two flavors, Hawaii and Adventurer. The Hawaii is the open-top version you see in the action pics, while the Adventurer is fully enclosed (the enhanced aerodynamics boost its top speed up to 28mph). You can spend a few hours on the water in either boat with the two gallon fuel tank and each one is outfitted with all kinds of waterproof compartments and a digital dashboard. The steering (via joystick) is apparently quite responsive even at high speeds.

Both models of PowerKayak weigh in at around 120 pounds and start at the not too brutal price of $2899. While they look more stable than their engineless counterparts, be careful not to tip one of these over; not only would you be stuck underwater without the aid of a paddle to flip yourself over, but that purring engine could start singing a pretty nasty tune above the water. [Gizmag]

Product Page [Bathys]