FCC wants to know your mobile broadband speed

This is the first time that I've purposefully disabled 3G on my iPhone 3GS (go to Preferences > General > Network) and Edge is painfully slow. In fact, while on Edge I had to re-run the test numerous times just to get 3 usable datapoints, because sometimes the test simply never completed. After the test results were in, I emailed myself a copy of the CSV report.

The results aren't pretty, especially if you are someone who lives in an area without 3G coverage from AT&T.

Here is a chart made of my results from the average of the three tests (and please note that, as shown in the screenshot, I was in a "5 bars" area, which should give AT&T the most favorable results possible):

Update: There's some confusion here due to the way that the app exports data. The numbers below are correct but the units which were originally shown were not.

There is more information about this quality test available at Broadband.gov.

AT&T also released an app called Mark the Spot to simplify reporting of trouble spots, which is a nice gesture. I hope that there will be some noticeable improvement in frequently reported areas. When I look at the chart above of the Edge speeds, I am reminded that AT&T didn't claim that Verizon was wrong, they claimed Verizon was misleading by making people think there was no coverage outside of 3G areas. AT&T wants to show you this data coverage map. but if you want to get a 3G map from AT&T... well, they give you a list instead. There used to be a checkbox (as shown here in my Flickr feed) to show AT&T's 3G/Mobile broadband coverage.

That checkbox option no longer exists. In fact, I couldn't find any way to get a map from AT&T showing me where the 3G coverage is and where it isn't.