VZW GN refugee's report on Nexus 5 on AT&T

[bjrosen]

I've just switched to a Nexus 5 on AT&T. Before I switched I had concerns about AT&T and if the N5 was significantly better than the GN so I thought I'd share my experience with you folks that are still on the Verizon GN.

AT&T vs Verizon: Two years ago, when the GN came out, Verizon had the only LTE network so I was concerned about moving to AT&T because they got a late start. So far I'm much happier with AT&T. I haven't run into any coverage issues yet although it's to soon to make a definitive statement about that. The performance of the AT&T network is much faster than Verizon. I'm getting 40MBits/Second in many places, I never saw anything close on Verizon, it was usually 8-12MBits/second. Before I switched I ran Speedtest on my GN at various places in my general area. For example in Nashua NH I was getting 6Mbits on Verizon, my N5 is getting 41MBits in the same location. I've seen this at several locations.

Battery life: The Nexus 5 is much better than the GN. I had a 3800ma battery in my GN and it still ate 10-15% of the battery per hour. My N5 is down only 15% in the last 8 hours.

Screen: I was concerned about moving from the GN's superamoled screen to the N5's IPS screen. I'm very happy with the N5s screen, it's much sharper that the GN. The colors aren't as good but the higher resolution more than makes up for this. The N5's screen has more viewing area than the GN in exactly the same space because the N5 eliminated the bezel area.

Voice quality. It's much much better. Don't know if it's the N5 or AT&T but the difference is night and day. Both sides of the conversation are clearer.

Speaker: It's louder and clearer. There is still a lot of room for improvement but it's definitely better than the GN.

WiFI: The N5 is 802.11AC the GN is 802.11N. I have FIOS and an 802.11AC router in my house. On Speedtest over WiFI I'm getting 160MBits down/65 MBits up on the N5 which is my full FIOS speed. The GN only did 35-40MBits/second. Running iPerf from my N5 to one of my Linux boxes gets 275MBits/second.

 

[DayThyme]

The performance of the AT&T network is much faster than Verizon. I'm getting 40MBits/Second in many places, I never saw anything close on Verizon, it was usually 8-12MBits/second. Before I switched I ran Speedtest on my GN at various places in my general area. For example in Nashua NH I was getting 6Mbits on Verizon, my N5 is getting 41MBits in the same location. I've seen this at several locations.

You can't attribute that to Verizon unless you use the same phone on the Verizon network as on the ATT network. Much of what you describe is due to the crap radios on the GNex.

I get 20-30Mbps on my Moto X in the exact same spot where my GNote3 can only do half that and the GNex 1/3 or less than that. That's all on the Verizon network. My Moto X clearly has better radios than either of my 2 Samsung phones.

To really know how much of the speed issue was due to ATT or Verizon's networks, you would need to test your ATT Nexus 5 against a Verizon Nexus 5, which of course isn't possible, but the next closest would be a Verizon LG G2. So if you know anyone with a Verizon LG G2, test their speeds side by side with your Nexus 5 to get a better feel for how the networks perform relative to each other.