3G operators in USA are falling short of their commitment on the promised speed. This is what a study from Gartner reveals. For records, AT&T emerged as the number one defaulter on speeds.

Cautioning the end-consumers to be more realistic in their expectations pertaining to speed of 3G networks the report prepared by analyst, Philip Redman also urged companies to thoroughly test products before investing in them.

"Most providers market speeds as high as 1.8Mbit/sec. on their 3G networks, but the fine print doesn''t guarantee such speeds," said the report.

The report points out that 3G operators in USA namely AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, mention speeds of broadband which implies data transfer speeds that are faster than 1.5Mbit/sec. for downloads and at least 250Kbit/sec. for uploads. The report points that in reality the speeds are generally between 300Kbit/sec and 700Kbit/sec lower than expected speeds.

Gartner says that these operators advertise that they can offer the advertised speeds but do not guarantee it.  

The report says that BlackBerry handsets support the fastest speeds. iPhone 3G offered on AT&T network cannot support speeds faster than 1.4 Gbps. This makes the 3G speeds offered by AT&T of 1.7Gbps useless on iPhone 3G. The same problem is encountered in some laptop PC cards as well.

The operators obviously refuted these revelations and now question the methodology adopted by Gartner.