A new report released to compares the networks of the four major US carriers in terms of both speeds and coverage.
OpenSignal today released its State of Mobile Networks: USA report, which measured the networks of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon between October 1 and December 31, 2016. In its Overall Network Comparison, OpenSignal found T-Mobile and Verizon to be neck-and-neck, with each carrier winning two awards and getting two draws.
T-Mobile and Verizon came in a virtual tie for LTE download speeds, with T-Mo posting an average speed of 16.65Mbps and Verizon putting up an average speed of 16.89Mbps. That’s an improvement for Verizon, as T-Mo won this category in OpenSignal’s last report six months ago. Meanwhile, AT&T came in third with an average speed of 13.86Mbps, and Sprint finished fourth with 8.99Mbps.
When it comes to 4G LTE availability, Verizon won out, with customers getting an LTE signal 88.17 percent of the time. T-Mobile has made progress here, though, and OpenSignal says that T-Mo is now “within a stone’s throw of matching Verizon signal for signal.” T-Mobile customers found themselves on LTE 86.6 percent of the time. Once again, AT&T came in third with 82.23 percent, while Sprint finished fourth with 76.81 percent, though that’s a big improvement over the 69.9 percent availability that Sprint had in August 2016.
In the other categories, T-Mobile won for 3G download speeds and 3G latency, while Verizon won for 4G LTE availability and 4G LTE latency.
OpenSignal’s report was put together using 4.6 billion measurements from 169,683 users of the OpenSignal app. The app is available on Android and iPhone.