For me, I’ve joined the whole unlimited mobile Internet game late. So one thing I’ve noticed is how fast T-mobile’s Edge (2G) Internet is. I mean long before I had mobile internet, I heard stories about it, how it was slow and how even 3G wasn’t that fast… at least all of these stories were for AT&T, and if any of them were talking about T-mobile, it was from like 2007 when iPhones first came out.

But I’ve noticed that my T-mobile 2G Edge seems to act, well… almost as if I had 3G. It’s very fast. In fact, I’ve noticed simple pages like news.google.com load up about the same speed as iPhones on AT&T’s 3G.

I started thinking about this… why would T-mobile give such good speed to their 2G network? All of their smart phones access their 3G network… and I’ve heard so many complaints of it’s 3G speed compared to AT&T’s 3G speed. I know T-mobile’s 2G’s network used so be dirt slow, but now they’ve put so much quality in it. Why bother when most complain about T-mobile’s 3G? After all, the only ones on T-mobile that even use 2G to the full extent are… iPhone users, that’s it!

That’s why T-mobile’s Edge is so fast and reliable now. It’s because of all the iPhone users. Any model iPhone unlocked and running on T-mobile are only able to access their 2G network. Makes perfect sense. They have virtually no new phones that use the 2G network, so T-mobile boosting it’s 2G network makes it’s iPhone users happy. After all, if people bring their iPhones over to T-mobile and are then let down by sluggish 2G speeds, they’ll jump back to AT&T.

Keeping T-mobile’s Edge boosted helps them steal AT&T iPhone customers, and because they’re paying for the 3G network speeds anyways, but can only access 2G… so it’s only in their best interest.

Now, I can’t speak for all areas… but in the Tampa Bay area, T-mobile’s Edge is nice ‘n’ fast. I took some speed results from the Neocell to show what I mean…

Peace, J