Recently we were contacted by readers Ahmad and Grant Smith who have completed some pretty exhaustive speed tests in their home regions of Dunedin and Hamilton / Cambridge respectively. Hopes were high for Vodafone customers that the iPhone 4′s 900Mhz capability (the first iPhone to work with that frequency, providing nationwide 3G coverage on Big Red) would close the gap between the iPhone experience for XT customers and their own which had been somewhat of a gulf on the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

On their own blogs, Ahmad and Grant Smith have found that in the majority of places they carried out tests, XT still blazes ahead of Vodafone. On buttonmasher Ahmad reports that in his tests XT had “a distinct and significant speed advantage over Vodafone 3G” while Grant Smith found that XT out-performed Vodafone at ten of the fifteen locations tested and found that speeds in some locations “were twice as fast or more than the Vodafone NZ Network, at the time of testing.”