I think, out of necessity, AT&T is improving nicely in many parts of the country.
I also have observed here at home, my Verizon speed tests have slowly averaged less and less over time. I really think the popularity and growth of data services with Verizon has forced the company to throttle their speeds over the past 6-9 months.
for example, I have been clocking speeds in 2010 that rarely hit over 1 Mbps download while 6 months ago, the EVDO Rev A would average 1.4- 1.6 Mbps. My gut feeling is that this is due to the growth and popularity of data services. I suspect that Verizon data speeds will continue to decline as more and more customers use the data plans. This is bad for us data veterans.
While 1 Mbps is OK for routine e-mail and web surfing to read, it is lacking for media streaming that likes to see speeds of 1.5 Mbps. From reports, I gather AT&T is improving their speeds across the land from a pitiful, barely adequate 150-200 kbps to 700k-1Mbps while verizon is becoming slower, meeting each other the middle. I suspect this trend to continue until we make the next big technology shift to LTE or "4G" Hopefully, all the carriers will enter into an era where speed and bandwidth capacity will not be limited. We saw this with HDTV on satellite services and that is no longer a major problem. I suspect that in 2 years speed for media streaming and quantity of data will no longer be throttled or remain a problem on wireless services either.
The point being is that if Verizon gets the iphone, a huge increase in data users before 4G is ready with the carriers and the devices, it may cause a serious crippling of EVDO like the iphone did with AT&T data speeds. If that happens, you all may discover AT&T become the best carrier for data. Ironic, isn't it?
