Was at a Dr.'s appointment with my Wife a few days ago and figured I'd check out the speeds in that area of Las Vegas (down in the southwest not too far from McCarran International Airport). It's the best I've had in the Las Vegas area so I ran a bunch of 'em in sequence - my T-Mobile service let's me do unlimited speed testing without dinging my data so, I literally did over 1.8GB of speed tests in a relatively short amount of time. I mean, at these actual consistent speeds, grabbing a gig and more of data happens faster than you realize.
As for the discussion about Verizon devices and using them with other carriers, it works like this: in the FCC auctions for new frequency bands in 2012-2013, Verizon ended up the big winner overall by gaining a huge chunk of 700 MHz spectrum. One of the caveats of the deal, however, was that they agreed to sell their devices from summer 2013 on GSM unlocked from the factory.
The particular technology that Verizon (and Sprint too) use for their 4G LTE capability requires the use of a SIM card in addition to the CDMA radios inside the devices; the SIM card works with the GSM radios their devices also have and so you're left with a device that can connect to both types of networks. Sprint, of course, likes to be the bastard of the litter and while their devices can be SIM unlocked for GSM carriers they tend to block such unlocking domestically meaning here in the US. It's a crappy thing but there are almost always workarounds that involve either flashing a non-domestic radio file on a given device or using a patch of some kind to system files on the device which 'unlocks' the GSM capability.
With respect to Verizon, the Droid Ultra was the first device they sold (in the summer of 2013) that came completely unlocked for GSM operation because of that auction caveat I mentioned earlier. The Droid MAXX and the Droid Mini followed soon after (same hardware basically, they're Droid versions of the Moto X), and pretty much every device they've sold since is GSM unlocked including the Droid TURBO - they're required
by law and the auction caveat to sell the devices unlocked for GSM operation. Good thing for consumers, but not always the cheapest solution since if you want to get the device but not use it with Verizon obviously you'll have to pay the full retail or asking price to get the hardware outright.
The speed tests in the image below were done using a Motorola Droid MAXX (manufactured in Dec 2014,
a Verizon Droid device) with my T-Mobile nanoSIM in place using T-Mobile's $30/month 100 mins/unlimited texts/5GB data up to 4G speeds then throttled to 2G/EDGE speeds. Like I said, this plan allows me to do unlimited speed tests as well as stream music from over 30 online music services like Spotify, Pandora, Slacker, and many others. They recently added Google Play Music to that Music Freedom program so I uploaded over 19,000 songs to my Google Play Music account and I use that for listening nowadays. Since May 1st I've pulled down almost 18GB of my own music off my Play Music account + those crazy speed tests that I've been doing all over town - close to 20GB of data so far. When I check my actual T-Mobile data usage, it's about 900MB so far... can't beat it for $30 a month.
The Droid MAXX covers LTE Band 4 which is what overlaps on T-Mobile hence me being able to make use of it. Works great, no issues, and I typically get 40+ hours of use from this smartphone before having to plug back in to charge - that's with over 6 hours of SOT aka screen on time as well. Not bad for a $50 phone I got on craigslist, eh?
Just for the record: you can use pretty much any Verizon-sold smartphone (since summer 2013) with any GSM carrier because they're unlocked for GSM operation and use SIM cards - you could walk into a Verizon store today, pay full price for a Droid TURBO, take out the Verizon SIM card and put in an AT&T or T-Mobile (or some MVNO that uses those networks), make sure the APN info is accurate and available (might have to add it if not), and voila, 4G LTE service (if it's available in your area, of course) on any of those carriers without issues.
You can't, of course, take any old device to Verizon, however. It's a one-way ride in those respects, and even though Sprint devices are primarily CDMA-based as well they won't work on Verizon's network because of dissimilar bands in use so Sprint devices are one-way in a similar respect. I owned an LG G2 (Sprint model) and installed a custom ROM on it known as CloudyG2 which opened up the radio for GSM operation and used it with my T-Mobile account just the same as I'm doing with this Droid MAXX, never had problems with it at all. In fact I've owned like 10 Verizon devices (and a few Sprint ones too) over the past 2+ years and used all of them with my T-Mobile service and never had problems.
