Last year, PC World tested 3G services in 13 major cities in US. They concluded that Verizon 3G service was fast and reliable, whereas AT&T 3G service was fast in some cities but reliability was an issue. PC World has again done the same test in 13 cities and now they say that AT&T’s 3G network is now the top performer in 13-city test, with download speeds 67 percent faster than its competitors.

On average, AT&T offered 1410 kbps download speed and 773 kbps upload speed compared to 877 kbps download and 434 kbps upload offered by Verizon. The surprising thing was when it came to reliability AT&T again topped the chart with 94 percent reliability compared to 92 percent offered by Verizon. Denver, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose were the only cities where AT&T’s network reliability was less than 95 percent. According to the test, AT&T offers fastest network in each of the 13 cities except Denver and Phoenix.

PC World says “In the past year, Sprint and Verizon--like AT&T--have seen a marked increase in the number of 3G smartphones that rely on their networks. Our speed results suggest that Sprint is upgrading its network capacity fast enough to meet the demand, while Verizon may be having trouble keeping up. Nevertheless, both networks’ reliability (the likelihood that a user can connect to the Internet at a reasonable speed) improved in the most recent tests over how they fared last spring.”

You can read the complete PC World wireless performance test report here.