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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.
T-Mobile switched from HSPA+ to LTE a few years ago.
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.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Speed doesn't matter is you have "zero bars"
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.
"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.
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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley