Verizon and T-Mobile Are In a Virtual Tie For the Best Network In the US (androidcentral.com)

Verizon has tied T-Mobile for the fastest carrier in the United States and both carriers are virtually tied for the "best" in overall LTE download speeds, according to Open Signal's State of Mobile Networks: USA report. Android Central reports: Using data collected from 169,683 users, 4,599,231,167 data points were used to measure network speeds on both 4G and 3G, network availability and latency. The data is collected by users installing the Open Signal app from Google Play or the App Store and going about their daily routine. In their analysis of the collected data, they say that Verizon has improved their 4G network speeds to pull even with T-Mobile who has traditionally done well in this category. They also mention that the average overall network speeds in the U.S. have risen slightly, and over 81% of U.S. residents have access to LTE networks. Availability of high-speed data services shows that all four carriers have improved, but T-Mobile (86.6%) is now within two percentage points of Verizon (88.2%) when it comes to finding an LTE signal. The company with the most improvement here is Sprint, who jumped from covering 69.9% in August to 76.8% in February 2017.

Comments

I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Zombie Ryushu]

I thought some carriers in the US like T-Mobile uses HSPA+ for 4G mode in the US rather than LTE, and Verizon is a CDMA Network. So, isn't this apples to oranges?

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[wasteoid]

T-Mobile switched from HSPA+ to LTE a few years ago.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Pizza]

No, T-Mobile's HSPA+ was sort of "3.5G" . Their "4G" stuff was always LTE.

But honestly, this "download speeds" metric of network superiority presumes you can even get a signal at all -- Out where I'm intending to move (rural NW Florida), the only carrier with coverage is Verizon, and not LTE at that. I have to drive a 5-10 miles to get any T-Mo service at all, and don't pick up LTE until I hit the outskirts of town or major highway, about 20 miles away.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Zombie Ryushu]

When I am in the US, my (BLU) Android Phone says 4G HSPA+

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Daemonik]

Yeah, T-Mobile is fine if you never leave the city limits, it sucks in rural areas. AT&T or Verizon are the big carriers with most rural coverage or there's the rural off brand MVNO's but they typically won't sell you a contract unless you live in their area.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[msauve]

Yea, this. "Best" isn't just speed, latency, and uptime, which is all this report covers. It's also coverage when you're out in the middle of nowhere. I understand that TMo's gotten somewhat better in some places, but it still doesn't nearly match VZW.

In TMo's own words, they "cover 97% of Verizon's population." Meh. Them's weasel words - it's not covering where the customers are, it's also covering where they aren't, like on a rural highway.

That misleading statistic reminds me of another in recent Sprint advertising, where they claim their network is within 1% of VZW for reliability. Sound good? Nope, it's terrible. The standard for telecom reliability is "5 nines," or 99.999% uptime. That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year. If you have a network which is only 99% reliable (e.g. within 1% of VZW), that's over 3 1/2 days of downtime per year.

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[squiggleslash]

T-Mobile runs both in parallel. Essentially T-Mobile is running three versions of GSM, regular 2G GSM, UMTS, and LTE. HSPA+ is kinda sorta the latest-greatest UMTS.

I _think_ T-Mobile is planning to drop 2G GSM, but I hope they don't as it's always been the most solid voice system in my experience and is nice as a fallback.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[squiggleslash]

From the beginning they called their HSPA+ "4G". Some of their devices, such as the myTouch Slide 4G, which was an HSPA+ device, not an LTE device.

And, you know, this is fine. 4G is a marketing term, not a technical term. People got upset because it wasn't IMT-Advanced, but there was never any official relationship between IMT-Advanced and 4G. Moreover, at the time HSPA+ was being called 4G, it was more or less equivalent to LTE in terms of data throughput. If LTE was 4G, HSPA+ certainly is too.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[NormalVisual]

Them's weasel words - it's not covering where the customers are, it's also covering where they aren't, like on a rural highway.

For sure, and it doesn't even have to be a rural highway. I have T-Mo, and I call my wife every day on the way home from work along U.S. 1 on the east coast of Florida, one of the busiest highways in the state. I get calls dropped 100% of the time - always at least once in a particular location, and often 2-3 times.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[squiggleslash]

I live in suburban Florida and have to drive through rural parts and even a national park on my way to work every day. I've never had a problem with T-Mobile's coverage in recent memory. Ten years ago, sure. But it's been a very long time since I saw my phone go to zero bars when I've been outside.

T-Mobile has been doing some major upgrades on its coverage over the last few years, but these things take time. They essentially got licenses eleven years ago that covered the entire country, but it takes a long time to actually get towers everywhere, especially if you're also having to constantly upgrade your existing towers.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[ctilsie242]

This. I'm on occasion at a couple farms where the closest town is at least 20 miles away. I've had good luck with T-Mobile, and even can stream YouTube without issue.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[unixisc]

LTE is OFDMA, which is a completely different technology. It's however a point of convergence for both CDMA and GSM, but companies do have to support their old networks for places that do not have LTE or even 3G coverage, b'cos there, their legacy tech would be the fallback

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[orlanz]

That's not a coverage issue, that's a congestion issue. Too many clients hopping onto one tower. That used to happen everyday here 3 years ago where the highways cross... on ATT. The phones on the highway side of the building become useless for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. If you get a call going, it's fine; else keep trying.

Coverage is easy to fix. It's very easy for the carries to see when people "fall off" their network and when they see a lot, they put up a tower to cover the hole. Congestion is harder to figure out and could mean backhaul upgrades.

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[NormalVisual]

That's not a coverage issue, that's a congestion issue. Too many clients hopping onto one tower.

I doubt it's a congestion issue - I leave work well before rush hour, and have had the same problem in the same area at 4:30am.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Higaran]

5 nines is perfectly reasonable when you have a wired system, but not as much when you have a wireless one. Wired phones are alot less prone to interference or just damage in general

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[usuallylost]

I have T-Mobile as my provider. Their coverage has gotten much better over the last two years. I still find areas where I have nothing, though. Especially down in coastal North Carolina where my mother lives. Verizon's network is clearly better as their network seems to be everywhere and it has at least tied for best performance.

When I compare the performance to the cost I can see why people take Verizon and I can see why people take T-Mobile. I had AT&T before T-Mobile and when I changed my bill, including financing a phone, was half what it was under AT&T. Also when operating in my area I get fewer dropped calls and generally faster performance than I did with AT&T. I can see how Verizon justifies their cost over T-Mobile. I have considered changing to Verizon myself just to have coverage when visiting family. I am having a real hard time seeing how AT&T justifies their cost compared to their service quality. Perhaps they are great someplace I don't go? In the areas, I do go T-Mobile works better and costs substantially less. I'd argue that Sprint actually does a better job of making their costs match up with the performance and coverage of their network than AT&T does.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[tepples]

When a call drops because the subscriber left the service area during the call, does that count as a "dropped call" for this statistic?

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Wycliffe]

Coverage is easy to fix. It's very easy for the carries to see when people "fall off" their network and when they see a lot, they put up a tower to cover the hole. Congestion is harder to figure out and could mean backhaul upgrades.

Congestion is probably easier to figure out. Do you not think they know when their tower is at or close to capacity? They might not be able to tell how many people are unable to connect but they can sure likely tell when it's full. Congestion can many times be fixed with an upgrade to an existing tower. Coverage can sometime be difficult to fix as "putting up a new tower" is easier said than done. My drive home goes thru a state park. ATT, Verizon, Tmobile, and Sprint ALL drop calls on that road. It has a fair amount of traffic too. The problem is likely that no one can get permission to put up a tower.

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[dgatwood]

That's not a coverage issue, that's a congestion issue.

I would argue that congestion issues are a form of coverage issues. Full coverage requires that cell sites' coverage area must overlap by a large enough margin that you are able to start talking to a new cell site before you lose the old one. If the towers' fringe reception area doesn't overlap enough out to allow a seamless switch under typical load, you need more towers to have full coverage in any meaningful sense of the word. But that's just me.

I suspect this is some combination of the towers not shedding load aggressively enough (forcing a handoff for cell handsets that are within range of a less busy tower) and cell phones dropping the connection to the old tower too soon after a handoff then losing the new cell site and being unable to reconnect to the old one quickly, but that's just a gut feeling. I've noticed that rain fade seems to make the problem a lot worse in many of the places that I drive, which tells me that low single-digit dB make the difference between towers overlapping and not. So there's definitely a general lack of towers involved, at least in the greater SF Bay Area.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[R3d M3rcury]

In TMo's own words, they "cover 97% of Verizon's population." Meh. Them's weasel words [...]

I gotta admit, I've always chuckled when I hear AT&T talk about how they "cover 97% of Americans"--not 97% of America.

A subtle but important difference.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[LynnwoodRooster]

Not just rural... This last weekend, i was at a trade show in a NYC hotel where we had our own 4G based connection for streaming audio (the hotel only had WIFI available, and it was swamped/dead - 50 kbps if you were lucky). The little T-mobile hot spot we bought was terrible - we were lucky to get 1 bar, and maybe 100 kbps. Out came my Verizon Note 5, on went the hot spot, and we had 4 full bars and 2 Mbps available. Rock-solid. And this was at the Marriott Marquis right at Times Square - heart of Manhattan!

People complain about the cost of Verizon, but you know - at least it works. Yes, it's expensive compared to the others but when your options are expensive and works and cheap and doesn't work - I'll take the former thankyouverymuch...

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[farble1670]

Yeah, T-Mobile is fine if you never leave the city limits, it sucks in rural areas.

Which is great for them, as they get much greater bang for their infrastructure buck by focusing on high density areas.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[swb]

I was in Manhattan 4 years ago we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Times Square and I couldn't get data *at all* unless we got 2-3 blocks away. The only time I had usable data was in the middle of the night.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[schnell]

No, T-Mobile's HSPA+ was sort of "3.5G" . Their "4G" stuff was always LTE.

Nope. In fact, T-Mobile was partly responsible with the whole BS confusion about "4G" and LTE.

Flash back to about five or six years ago. "4G" was generally understood by people in the cellular industry to refer to the 3GPP standardized Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which represented a quantum leap in the GSM family of technologies. Unfortunately, LTE was new and nobody was deploying it yet in the US (Verizon was first eventually, followed by AT&T). At this point, neither Sprint or T-Mobile had announced LTE plans.

Sprint - even then struggling for a positive message to tell about its network and one up its competitors - came up with the brilliant marketing idea to take its WiMAX (remember WiMAX?) Clearwire network and claim that it was the first "4G" network in the US. Whether you could claim WiMAX as a fourth generation digital cellular technology is debatable but if you squint just right it might have been okay.

T-Mobile saw this move and wanted to be able to make similar marketing claims to Sprint about 4G. They basically said, "our HSPA+ is faster than WiMAX. So it must be 4G too!" So even though there was no justifiable way to claim that HSPA+ was a 4G technology, T-Mobile started saying "we have 4G too!" Of course, AT&T didn't want to appear behind Sprint and T-Mobile so they adopted the ruse later too. (Verizon was still using 3G CDMA so it wasn't an option for them to join in the fun.)

If you look carefully at carrier ads today, you will still usually see their LTE coverage maps listed as "4G LTE" in order to distinguish it from their "faux G" HSPA+ or other 3G technologies. All because of some dodgy marketing decisions on Sprint and T-Mobile's parts.

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[ncc74656]

I _think_ T-Mobile is planning to drop 2G GSM

It's AT&T that's shutting down EDGE (aka "2G") service in the near future (it may have already happened, as the link says "by the end of 2016"). T-Mobile, OTOH, has committed to keeping its EDGE service going through at least 2020, ostensibly to support gadgets with cellular-data connections that aren't easily updated to newer standards.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[vilanye]

Be fair, over 80% of America is empty. 15% is just small towns with ignorant rednecks that couldn't use a "smart" phone if their pathetic lives depended on it.

Re: I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[starblazer]

Not exactly. In my area there is one area that always drops calls along a state highway, no matter who you were with. VZW, US Cellular, AT&T, Nextel. Still happens to this day. It's purely a cost limitation. They COULD put a tower there, but it would be not worth it for the 1/2 mile that the signal dies for in the middle of nowhere.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Shirley Marquez]

T-Mobile did refer to their HSPA+ service as 4G for marketing reasons, but they were also building out LTE service at the same time. In the places where they had HSPA+42 available on the 1700 MHz band the speeds were actually comparable to first generation LTE service, though the latency was worse and they couldn't support as many users. Since then they have reallocated their spectrum; 1700 MHz is now being used for LTE. They're running HSPA+ on their smaller 1900 MHz allocations and are only running HSPA+21 there. Their data service actually got worse for the handful of phones that support HSPA+42 but not LTE.

There are still parts of T-Mobile's coverage map where the fastest service available is HSPA+. They are mostly remote areas with relatively low demand, so it's good enough for now. They are continuing to roll out LTE to those areas, as well as upgrading more densely populated areas with higher speed LTE and band 12 (700 MHz) service.

Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE

[Shirley Marquez]

Since you speak of "when you are in the US", your phone probably doesn't support the bands used for LTE in North America. They're not the same as the ones used in the rest of the world. Nobody produces a true LTE world phone yet, though we're gradually getting closer.

Speed ain't everything

[MattSinger]

Speed doesn't matter is you have "zero bars"

Re:Speed ain't everything

[twocows]

My experience with T-Mobile has been that their coverage is spotty at best. They're a great company with great service and good business ethics, which is why I chose and continue to choose them over their competitors. But if you're judging based on coverage, they're not the greatest.

Re:Speed ain't everything

[twocows]

I should mention that they are getting better, though, which is another reason I like them.

Re:Speed ain't everything

[nine-times]

Right in the summary:

Availability of high-speed data services shows that all four carriers have improved, but T-Mobile (86.6%) is now within two percentage points of Verizon (88.2%) when it comes to finding an LTE signal.

Now that doesn't mean that T-Mobile coverage is as good as Verizon's where you live, but it does indicate that according to this study, T-Mobile's LTE coverage is on par with Verizon's nation wide.

Re:Speed ain't everything

[antdude]

T-Mobile lost to Verizon barely in my rural area. :P However, Verizon doesn't get good signals much.

"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[QuietLagoon]

"Best" for me is coverage in the areas that I frequent and require a good cell signal. For me, Verizon fails the test, not even havingg one bar at one location I frequent, while AT&T has at least four bars in all the locations I frequent. I've not had a chance to try T-Mobile at this point.

Re:"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[Sporkinum]

May not want to bother. T-Mobile has terrible coverage. They also use high frequencies that can't penetrate buildings, so if there aren't any T-mobile indoor repeaters it won't work in a lot of buildings.

Re:"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[drinkypoo]

I am on T-Mobile but I don't think they actually have any towers in my town so I'm roaming at all times. My lady's prepay phone is on Verizon and usually doesn't work here at all. So I'm right there with you. It is possible to use T-Mobile where I live, and impossible to use Verizon.

Re:"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[Anonymous Coward]

This info is a little dated. T-mobile is rapidly deploying "band 12" support throughout the nation. Band 12 is actually relatively low frequency (and consequently lower bandwidth which may explain the slower speeds tested in the article). If you are in an area where Band 12 is deployed _and_ you're using a Band 12 phone T-Mobile's coverage is getting pretty good. Until recently my wife had a Moto X 2014 which does not support Band 12 and my Nexus 6P does. Standing side-by-side there were quite a few times where she had no signal and I did. She now has a Pixel and she reports much better coverage.

Re:"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[blackomegax]

band 12 is a scam to give them "LTE" coverage in more areas, but at 2g speeds (or less based on my experience with it)

Re:"Best" for me is not the fastest...

[rotorbudd]

You're right, band 12 is the thing.
My house was built in the '40s and with the walls being plaster and lath with wire mesh in between I pretty much live in a faraday cage.
I'm on Project Fi and the best Tmobile signal I ever saw was 2 bars.
They added band 12 about 3 weeks ago and I've had full bars anywhere in the house ever since.

This duopolists both suck

[idji]

I don't care if they tie. Where one fails the other works. Why can't we have comprehensive coverage? I live in Orange County where houses are on average 1.8M$, and still no comprehensive coverage. Mountainous Austria gets it right. They just ignore the same amount of population.

Re:This duopolists both suck

[NormalVisual]

I'd love having a 150' tower in my back yard, so long as I also had rights to put my own antennas on it as well.

Re:This duopolists both suck

[farble1670]

I live in Orange County where houses are on average 1.8M$

WTF does that to do with anything? Is your wireless bill proportional to your property value?

Second best is good enough?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When Avis was in second place to Hertz, they created the iconic ad campaign, We are in second place. So we try harder.

Now Sprint is doing a campaign, We are in second place. That is good enough.

How much the attitude of corporations has changed and how low our expectations have fallen!

Re:Second best is good enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Second best IS good enough if it is cheaper. That is the point of the Marketing campaign. Why pay more for a network that is 1%-2% better? I have no idea if those claims are true.

Re:Second best is good enough?

[Bearhouse]

Except they didn't. (Try harder, that is)...

Re:Second best is good enough?

[0100010001010011]

Now Sprint is doing a campaign, We are in second place. That is good enough.

Most of the ads I've seen point out the price differences associated with being in the different places.

If you had the option of 3 phone services:

• #1 - $500/mo
• #2 - $100/mo
• #3 - $25/mo

Which one do you pick? If the #3 provider covered the area where you'll use it would you really splurge another $450/mo on #1 just because it was #1?

Re:Second best is good enough?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Do you really believe what they say in the ads?

Why did they have to create Truth in Advertising laws?

BTW courts have held corporations are people endowed with all the rights of real people, including speech and religion.

They have help spending money is speech to gut campaign finance regulations

Companies have argued protection to lie in advertisements claiming first amendment freedom of speech

So far courts have made a distinction for "commercial speech" and applied restrictions based on tort and contract laws

Not sure how long this distinction will last, given all other rights given to the corporation people on equal footing to living people.

We might lose Truth in advertisement, fair disclosure laws, not sure how long this distinction can last given so much of rights given to people created by one person by a 120$ filing fee in 2 minutes, over people created by two people over nine months.

Re: Meta-network is the best.

[nitehawk214]

Fi is a combination of T-Mobile and Sprint.

For me that means it is basically always T-Mobile. The places where Sprint's map claimed it had coverage where T-Mobile doesn't, it simply failed to connect at all.

However, Fi doesn't tell you which it is on, as far as I know.

Two problems with T-Mobile

[OneHundredAndTen]

One, coverage outside urban areas is patchy. Two, even in urban areas, coverage in some shops (Target, Home Depot, etc.) is nonexistent.

Re:Two problems with T-Mobile

[tepples]

But then don't you have to open a web browser, agree to the terms that the captive portal presents, and convince the party on the other end to install the same VoIP app you're using, if it's even available for his or her computer or smartphone?

Re:Two problems with T-Mobile

[SeaFox]

But then don't you have to open a web browser, agree to the terms that the captive portal presents, and convince the party on the other end to install the same VoIP app you're using...

Yeah, Wi-fi Calling... have your heard of it?

Re:Two problems with T-Mobile

[blackomegax]

Tmobile does wifi calling and wifi texting once you auth.

Re:Two problems with T-Mobile

[tepples]

If you don't have a signal inside a store, and you forget to sign in to the captive portal, incoming calls will go straight to voice mail. It's even worse with stores that make the in-store hotspot available only to paid subscribers to the store's discount club.

Re:Two problems with T-Mobile

[SeaFox]

The point is it negates that whole "convince people to use third-party VoIP app" nonsense, which would be a bigger problem than remembering to sign in a portal when you come in the door at a business.

Re: Meta-network is the best.

[dreamchaser]

It also uses US Cellular.

Same here

[daninaustin]

When we go on vacation i pick up a sim card for cricket (which uses ATT network) to go along with our TMobile phones. Last time we took a vacation and drove from the Texas panhandle up through the black hills in South Dakota we had absolutely no service from TMobile the whole way. Normally here in Austin and in other populated areas TMobile works great and is much cheaper than getting a plan from ATT or Verizon (who actually do have coverage in a lot of the sparsely populated areas.) The meager 5 MB of roaming that TMobile offers (per month) was completely useless since it was immediately eaten up by google maps and syncing email.

Urban vs the rest

[damn_registrars]

Sure, T-Mobile works great if you live in a city or well-populated suburb. But if you're outside a city, Verizon usually has a distinct advantage in actually making calls. For some people, that doesn't matter but for others the ability to make a phone call is vastly more important than your mobile data bandwidth.

T-Mobile actually spends on infrastructure

[SuperKendall]

according to this study, T-Mobile's LTE coverage is on par with Verizon's nation wide.

I think at this point that may be about right...

I've been with T-Mobile a number of years now, and was with Verizon before that. At first I would say T-Mobile coverage was not nearly as good. But in the past year or two I think T-Mobile has really focused a lot on building out infrastructure, as now almost anywhere I go in the U.S. has been really good. In particular, I was never able to get much signal at all on trips to Alaska in past years, but last year was able to get LTE in pretty much every coastal city (taking a cruise).

The only places they lag behind are on more remote roads (though even there they have improved), and also on things like repeaters in hotel conference areas (I think Version/AT&T have a lot more of those set up).

One last thing about coverage - in one sense at least T-Mobile is vastly ahead of Verizon, and that is if you travel internationally at all. With Verizon I had to page some pretty huge fees for a small amount of data. With T-Mobile I have good all over the place in Europe and South America, and was able to use my phone with data the whole time for zero extra fee - that is a huge benefit.

Re:T-Mobile actually spends on infrastructure

[nine-times]

The only places they lag behind are on more remote roads (though even there they have improved), and also on things like repeaters in hotel conference areas (I think Version/AT&T have a lot more of those set up).

Also, I didn't read the whole report, but they seem to be saying that T-Mobile is on par with Verizon for LTE coverage. From that information alone, it's possible that Verizon still has better 3G and 2G coverage in rural areas that don't get 4G coverage from anyone.

Rank placement is not a real property

[Solandri]

1st place by a mile is very different from 1st place by a whisker. The best example I've seen is a couple webcomics who got into an argument with each other. One tried to point out that it was ranked like 1000th in popularity while the other was ranked around 3000th. That's irrelevant and in fact downright deceptive when the viewership numbers between the two only differed by about 30% (both were well down in the bell curve, so a small difference in viewership translated into a huge difference in ranking)..

Rank placement is not a property of the thing being analyzed. It's an artificial property which arises from putting data into a database. it has about as much meaning as the number and letter of the cell in a spreadsheet. Only stupid marketers crow about ranking. Real data analysis would use a scatter plot (with both axes starting at zero) so you can easily see how close or far apart the different competitors are.

Would you rather buy a computer which tells you the exact processor speed, amount of RAM, and HDD storage; or a computer which says it has the 5th fastest processor, the 3rd most RAM,and the 2nd largest HDD that the brand name sells?

Rural areas seem pretty covered also

[SuperKendall]

it's possible that Verizon still has better 3G and 2G coverage in rural areas that don't get 4G coverage

Many rural areas I've been to in the U.S. in the past year or two now have 4G coverage (from T-Mobile at least). By remote I mean more like, the middle of Utah or a very large national park. Even there you can sometimes find service, depending (at a Zion overlook I had three bars of LTE!).

At my mothers house (which is in the countryside) I used to never be able to get a signal at all, Verizon or T-Mobile. In the past year I now get two bars of LTE there.

Re:Rural areas seem pretty covered also

[nine-times]

I just mentioned this because, at my parents house, the only option was Verizon 3G up until just a couple years ago. These days T-Mobile and Verizon both have LTE, but I don't know if this is that case in more rural areas in general.

race to the bottom

[OrangeTide]

There is no [absolute] best network in the US, it's all relative. We usually ignore the hundreds of countries that have a better wireless infrastructure than the US.

The nearly unregulated mobile carrier industry in the US is about minimizing services while maximizing customer billing. In this business you only have to be better enough to capture market share.

Re:Cellular is local

[OrangeTide]

I save about $50/mo with T-Mobile over Verizon for my family, so even though it barely works indoors I compensate with WiFi. Most of my phone conferences for work are done with WiFi and not 4G because Google Voice doesn't feel the need to charge me anything for a rather useful service. Per-minute plans with T-Mobile or one of the resellers (Ting, etc) is pretty cheap if you avoid using minutes, messages and megabytes excessively.

Customer service?

[farble1670]

Someone should say ... T-Mobile is fine, as long as you never, ever need to speak to a customer rep. Literally, if you have a problem where you need an actual person to be involved, you might as well get a refund.

ATT Before cingular

[BrookHarty]

Worked at ATT Wireless during the Cingular merger. ATT had the best network in the US and Cingular the worst. When we merged, we ran reports of with blue vs orange to show the quality of the wireless network. Management didn't like being shown how bad cingulars network was, outages, dropped connections, slow bandwidth, told us to merge our reports into orange only to mask problems. Its only gone down hill since then.

Watching Dr Who while walking

[Maxo-Texas]

So I watched Dr Who S9E3 on my phone while walking last night. It made the miles evaporate, it was flawless (so fast enough!), on my Metropcs phone which is on the Tmobile network. Used very little of my 16gig alotment to boot. I used to be Tmobile but they were more expensive. And verizon was even more expensive than Tmobile.

Crazy compared to even 10 years ago.

What is the "metropcs" equivalent for the Verizon network? I go to a convention yearly which only has Verizon repeaters and is surrounded by 2' of concrete and also underground under the hotel! Would be nice to have a 'drop' phone for the con.

T mobile was off the grid for me

[talesofchangeand]

I'm in the NY metro area and tried T-mobile switching the whole family from Verizon. Was told there was coverage. Got home; no signal whatsoever. Drove around and lost coverage everywhere we went. Family was ready to kill me. Went crawling back to Verizon.. Really couldn't believe it that in 2017 and with all the commercials..I was really dumbfounded but people in the area seems to think it works.