The annual ritual of St. Patrick's Day includes the inevitable bar crawl and lots of partying. What better way to accompany such activities than selfies, video uploads and music downloads? For those people who will be celebrating in Manhattan, CNBC now has the data on which Irish bars have the best connectivity for their customers.
The research comes from Global Wireless Solutions, or more simply GWS. Founded in 1996, the firm is an industry leader in benchmark testing for cellphone companies. When you see a commercial from AT&T or Verizon describing the quality of their service, chances are the data comes from GWS.
In the past decade, the company has driven over 9 million miles around the world measuring a variety of factors, including reliability and speed. The data help cellphone companies decide if they need to improve their coverage, possibly by adding more towers.
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GWS sent out teams of three engineers to each location, decked out in a variety of high tech electronics, measuring and assesing the cell quality at each location.
New York's best
GWS studied 20 of Manhattan's most popular Irish bars for this report. Most of them were located in midtown, with a few closer to Wall Street or the Upper East Side.
At the top of the list, the winner was O'Reilly's Pub & Restaurant. GWS measured a combination of uploads and downloads on small and large files to find that O'Reilly's had the fastest total times. The full list of 20 is here.
- O'Reilly's Pub & Restaurant
- Kinsale Tavern
- Dublin 6
- McGee's
- Molly's
- O'Hara's
- Connolly's Pub & Restaurant
- Cassidy's Pub
- Emmett O'Lunney's (W 50th St)
- O'Reilly's Off Fifth
- Tír Na Nog (W 39th St)
- Blarney Rock Pub
- Scallywag's Irish Pub
- Playwright Celtic Pub
- O'Lunney's (W 45th St)
- Molloy's Irish Pub
- Tir Na Nog (Penn Plaza)
- O'Brien's
- Gabby O'Haras
- The Irish American Pub
The full interactive map is below:
Paul Carter, founder and CEO of GWS, said that the New York bar scene had "extremely impressive reliability," especially when compared to a global competitor like London. "All the operators have done a good job deploying LTE in these locations." He points out that "even the voice calls had over 99 percent reliability—very impressive."
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And in case you were wondering, they measured the speeds on iPhone 6 versus Samsung S5. For the most part, everything was the same, "except the Samsung had faster upload speeds."