T-Mobile vs Verizon vs AT&T: New year, new 5G speed tests, same old leader

T-Mobile vs Verizon vs AT&T: New year, new 5G speed tests, same old leader،

We're only a little over a week away from the start of 2024, and T-Mobile has already made headlines and generated both excitement and frustration for its rapidly growing customer base with a a number of official and unofficial announcements. This incredibly eventful start to the year continues today for the ever-busy “Un-carrier” with another one of those comprehensive mobile network experience reports that looks as rosy as these things come for Magenta at first glance .

But if we look more closely at the results of latest national tests conducted by Opensignal and comparing it with previous research from the same company, you might conclude that T-Mo has at least some major areas of concern while Verizon and AT&T aren't doing (quite) as bad as you think.

The 5G speed battle is getting (a little) closer

This may sound weird or downright ridiculous, but both Verizon and AT&T can be (relatively) happy with their latest 5G download speed scores of 135.3 and 123.5 Mbps respectively, although they are miles away from T's towering (and landmark) 204.9 Mbps result. -Mobile.

T-Mobile vs Verizon vs AT&T: New year, new 5G speed tests, same old leader

It's because Verizon and AT&T's earnings from July 2023 are much greater than T-Mo's progress over the same period, perfectly illustrating the almost immediate impact of the silver and bronze medalists' recent C-band deployments and suggesting that this race could become even tighter in time.

Of course, Magenta can only be delighted by the huge 5G speed advantage it continues to hold over its main rivals, with the realistic hope of seeing the 200+ Mbps test result further improved at over the next two years thanks to various technological advances. , world firsts and good old extensions of existing mid-band spectrum to even more territories across the country.

But for the moment, T Mobile seems to have a bit of a problem with 5G download speeds, pretty clearly losing that particular battle against Verizon in Opensignal's latest report after breathing down Big Red's neck just six months ago.

On the bright side, the Un-carrier has somehow managed to extend its lead over both AT&T and Verizon regarding overall download speed and upload speed experiences between July 2023 and January 2024. Since not everyone can find a 5G signal everywhere and all the time these days, these seem to be the categories that most speed junkies should mainly worry about, and if you're in this camp , you may want to make sure you are connected to the best carrier on the market.

T-Mobile 9 – Verizon 5 – AT&T 1

It's the overall tally of titles and trophies from the Big Three carriers in this incredibly broad year-opening study that highlights how far AT&T remains behind its competitors and how Verizon it's getting really threatening T Mobilethe supremacy of the network experience.

While it can certainly be argued that T-Mo's gold medals and crowns are shinier, flashier, and ultimately more important than those of his number one rival, you should all know better than to focus exclusively on download speeds. It's clearly difficult to name T Mobile as a champion of the 5G experience based on this particular set of data, which highlights Verizon in first place for 5G video, 5G live video, And 5G games on top of 5G download speed.

Certainly, the differences are much smaller in favor of Big Red in these rankings than in favor of Big Red. T Mobile's huge 5G download speed advantage, and the same is more or less true for the overall Video Experience, Live Video, and Gaming categories, all of which are won by Magenta.

This brings us to Opensignal's research coverage section, which is divided into four equally important subsections. This is the only part of the report where AT&T comes (narrowly) in the lead, beating Verizon by a meager 0.3 percentage points in terms of overall network availability.

That's not even much of a consolation victory considering how ubiquitous 4G LTE connectivity has become over the past decade, which is clearly not what we can say about it. T MobileThis is a landslide victory for 5G availability. That's almost more impressive than the aforementioned 5G download speed triumph, especially when backed up by a less comfortable but still clear victory in the 5G coverage experience department.

Finally, VerizonThe overall victory of the coverage experiment is largely offset by a loss of network coherence for T Mobile which seals the fate of the January 2024 Wireless Championship once and for all. If you're not entirely sure what each of these performance indicators actually means and is supposed to indicate, you'll obviously find all the details and explanations you need you need on the Opensignal website.