Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB Smartphone Review – AT&T 4G LTE

Samsung Galaxy S III 4G LTE Testing

This review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t try out the 4G LTE
wireless speeds on the AT&T network as that is one of the most important things with any 4G LTE smartphone!

At our office we get 4G LTE service with three to four bars on the
signal strength. We downloaded the Speedtest.net App to check how our
upload and download speeds were on the Galaxy S III.

When we fired up and ran the app we found that with the auto-selected server we were getting roughly 31 Mb/s down and 5.6 MB/s up. These are some of the best 4G LTE speeds that we have ever seen in St. Louis, Missouri. AT&T has invested more than $2.1 billion from 2008 to 2011 in improving the wireless network in St. Louis and it looks like it is really paying off. We regularly get around 30MB/s down and 6 MB/s up around the metro area and the data transfer speeds are amazing.

We wanted to see how some older smartphones do on the AT&T network, so we grabbed the Motorola Atrix and Samsung Galaxy S II to see how they perform on the same server on the same time period.

Samsung Galaxy S III:

Samsung Galaxy S II:

Motorola Atrix:

We ran the Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy S III smartphones one minute apart on the same exact server and in the same position on our desk and the results were very different. The Samsung Galaxy S III hit 22MB/s down and 5MB/s up and the Samsung Galaxy S II was only able to reach 1MB/s down and 0.14MB/s up. The Samsung Galaxy S III was found to have 22x better download speeds and roughly 38x better upload speeds! We switched SIM cards over to the Motorola Atrix and found that it was getting 1MB/s down and 0.5MB/s up. The Samsung Galaxy S III is a true 4G LTE device

AT&T 4G LTE Data plans for Smartphones:

• DataPlus – $20 monthly access for 300MB monthly allowance
• DataPro – $30 monthly access for 3GB monthly allowance
• DataPro – $50 monthly access for 5GB monthly allowance and mobile hotspot

When you buy a Samsung Galaxy S III from AT&T you have a choice between the three data plans. If you go over your allowed bandwidth usage you are charged more. For example if you go over the 300MB allowance on the DataPlus plan you will be billed $20 for each additional 300MB used. If the allowance on a DataPro plan is exceeded, an additional 1GB is automatically provided at a rate of $10 for each additional 1GB. As you can see data plans can get very pricey and with download speeds of over 30MB/s and upload speeds around 6MB/s you can blow through a 300MB data plan in under a minute if you wanted to try.