I recently left AT&T for Sprint. I listed my primary reasons for this in an article last week, and I was fully aware that one of the costs of using Sprint was a slower data network. The things I read compared mostly the theoretical download speeds, claiming that AT&T could get up to 14Mbps, while Sprint could get somewhere around 3Mbps.

This is a tremendous difference — almost a fifth! — but 3Mbps is still not too shabby. Furthermore, this is the theoretical download speed. Using my iPhone 4 on AT&T, I compared speeds with a colleague who was using 3G on some Droid variant on Sprint. We both got about 3Mbps, though my upload speed on AT&T was much faster than his on Sprint. So although AT&T could be much faster, I figured, the actual rates is about the same.

I got my new iPhone 4S on Friday, at the same time as everyone else. I was on WiFi all of Friday, except for a few tests on speedtest.net to check it out. But on Saturday, I went for a bike ride into the middle of nowhere, and tried out Siri on the ride. Roughly half the times I tried, Siri responded that she couldn't get a network connection. I got a bit lost (I'm still new to Houston), and pulled up the Maps app. And the map wouldn't load.

When I got home the first thing I did was use the speedtest.net app on Sprint's 3G network. Repeatedly, I got about .1Mbps. This is absurd. To think of all the complaining people did about AT&T, and I was getting .1Mbps!

Later that day my wife wanted to go shopping, so I sat outside enjoying the weather, catching up on my RSS feeds. And sure enough, the data was so bad that not only did my battery die in a mere few hours (on CDMA, weak connections destroy your battery faster than GSM), but I couldn't even sync my RSS feeds. My wife called me, saying she was done shopping, and to use Find My Friends to locate her. But I couldn't even get a connection, despite my perfect four bars of reception.

It took me until last night to realize it, but Sprint's data speeds made me really depressed. Here I've got the latest and the greatest phone ever made, and I can't even do a Google search when I'm not at home. Why did I switch to Sprint? AT&T would have been blazing fast right now. I felt like I was back in China using China Mobile's GPRS network behind the great firewall (and even that was faster!).

This morning I tested it again, the same way when your tooth is sore you can't stop from tonguing it.

And voila. 1.4Mbps. Still not 3Mbps, or what my boss was getting at the same time on Verizon's network, but it was 14 times faster.

So come on, Sprint. I'm rooting for you. Apparently my emotional well being is relying on you too.