AT&T dominated download speeds, T-Mobile US has fastest average uploads
Overall network speeds are on the rise and the four national networks are mostly running neck-and-neck in different testing categories, but AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US each shine in different ways, according to the latest data analysis from OpenSignal.
Out of Opensignal’s seven award categories, T-Mobile US and Verizon each won three awards, and AT&T won one award for Download Speed Experience. Sprint did not win awards in any category.
“The most dramatic changes in network experience that we observed since our January 2020 report were in download and upload speeds,” the crowdsourced testing company said in its newly released July 2020 mobile network experience report for the United States. AT&T users, it went on, “saw the biggest gains in Download Speed Experience, with AT&T users seeing an average download speed of 32.6 Mbps, which is up from 27.5 Mbps in our January report.”
T-Mobile US, meanwhile, boosted its upload speeds. Average upload speeds for T-Mo users rose nearly 2 Mbps from OpenSignal’s last round of testing, to 10.5 Mbps — which OpenSignal said was 2.9 Mbps faster than what Verizon users were experiencing and 4.6 Mbps faster than observations of AT&T’s users. OpenSignal theorized that the upload speed increase might be due to T-Mobile US’ 600 MHz 5G deployments and the additional spectrum it has been able to use during the ongoing COVID-10 crisis.
Verizon, meanwhile, notched a solid win in video user experience, narrowly beat out T-Mobile US in 4G availability and squeaked by AT&T in 4G coverage.
OpenSignal also added game testing to its U.S. evaluations for the first time, and three of out of the four U.S. operators scored in the “fair” category, which means that users found the experience “average” and “in most cases the game was responsive to the actions of the player.” T-Mobile US offered the best gaming experience out of the four national networks, OpenSignal concluded. In considering gaming experience, the company took into account experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network and the impacts of latency, packet loss and jitter.
The report was based on data collected during a 90-day period starting March 16 and ending June 13, from nearly 16 million measurements from around 2.4 million devices. 5G users contributed to the data, as did users on any type of of phone. The testing company also assessed Sprint as a separate carrier, although it noted in the report that it will discontinue coverage of Sprint when the network is integrated with T-Mobile US’ (which recently reportedly shut down Sprint’s 2.5 GHz 5G network) or when the brand is retired, which is expected to happen at some point this summer.
Check out the full report here.
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