T-Mobile Still Tops Rivals for 5G Availability, Download and Upload Speeds – PCMag UK
Your odds of having a 5G connection remain highest on T-Mobile, and your download and upload speeds on that carrier will also probably exceed those on AT&T and Verizon by a comfortable margin, a new survey finds.
Opensignal’s Mobile Network Experience report, posted Monday, continues a winning streak for T-Mobile in the research firm’s network tests. On its top metric of availability—how often do devices on a carrier’s network get a 5G signal—T-Mobile’s score of 67.9% improves by 10 percentage points from last summer’s Opensignal findings.
“T-Mobile’s score is almost six times that of second-placed AT&T, and around nine times that of Verizon,” an advance copy of Opensignal’s report reads.
T-Mobile also retains a commanding lead in Opensignal’s download speed experience metric, or “the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across an operator’s mobile data networks”: 139.3Mbps versus 49.9Mbps at AT&T and 42.6Mbps at Verizon. T-Mobile also leads its rivals in “upload speed experience”: 13.9Mbps, with Verizon at 8.3Mbps and AT&T at 6.6Mbps.
Opensignal’s report also breaks out 5G-only speeds. T-Mobile is fastest at downloads (an average of 226.7Mbps, versus 150.5Mbps at Verizon and 142.1Mbps at AT&T), but Verizon bests it at 5G uploads (21.2Mbps, T-Mobile second at 18.8Mbps and AT&T third at 14.1Mbps).
And T-Mobile tops Opensignal’s consistency benchmark, which the report says “measures if the network is sufficient to support common mobile application requirements at a level that is ‘good enough’ for users to maintain (or complete) various typical tasks on their devices.” T-Mobile earns a score of 80.6 out of 100, ahead of Verizon’s 79.1 and AT&T’s 76.8.
Those continued high scores reflect how Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile has aggressively deployed the fast, reasonably far-reaching midband 5G it markets as Ultra Capacity 5G. The C-band frequencies AT&T and Verizon use offer similar performance and coverage, but they got a much later start putting them into service.
Verizon, however, wins higher scores in Opensignal’s hybrid metrics assessing video, live video, and gaming experiences on 5G: 70.2 points, 70.9 points, and 82.6 points out of 100. T-Mobile ranks second in those categories (67.9, 68.7, and 77.9) and AT&T is third (65.4, 65.7, and 69.8).
AT&T, meanwhile, edges out its competitors in overall availability—defined as “what proportion of time people have a network connection, in the places they most commonly frequent”—with a score of 99.5 out of 100, just ahead of Verizon’s 99.3 and T-Mobile’s 98.7.
Finally, Verizon earns the best score for coverage, 9.6 out of 10. AT&T ranks second at 9.1 and T-Mobile is third at 8.7. T-Mobile’s plans to buy much of the towers and frequencies of the regional carrier UScellular—should regulators approve them—could yield improvements to that score.
T-Mobile was the highest-rated nationwide carrier in PCMag’s most recent Readers’ Choice awards with a score of 8.4 out of 10, but services reselling its network and those of its competitors–Consumer Cellular, Google Fi, the now-T-Mobile-owned Mint Mobile, and Verizon’s Visible–ranked still higher. T-Mobile’s move to jack up rates on older plans could yield a downgrade of that score.
Opensignal collects this data with user consent both from its own apps and from software installed in partner apps “strategically selected to cover a wide range of users, demographics, and devices.” That methodology sets its results apart from data collected through drive testing on particular routes, which is how we did our own network testing through 2022. Opensignal collected this survey’s data from March 1 through May 29.
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