The story of the day is a familiar one when it comes to the US wireless carrier situation. We have another quarterly report that shows T-Mobile with a large lead in terms of download speeds, a slight lead in upload speeds, the highest consistency, and all sorts of 5G wins.
This new report is from Ookla, who you likely know as the company behind Speedtest.net. This is their Q4 2023 report, and yeah, the entire thing is nothing but a praisefest for T-Mobile’s current network.
BEST WIRELESS NETWORK IN US: When it comes to those download speeds I mentioned above, T-Mobile showed median overall speeds of 188.96Mbps, while Verizon came in 2nd at 91.62Mbps. AT&T was just behind Verizon’s number. For uploads, everyone was close, but T-Mobile squeaked out a win with 12.19Mbps. Clearly, we need a bigger focus going forward on those upload speeds from everyone.
The other categories in this report include latency, consistency, video scores, and then a bunch of those categories with only 5G measured. T-Mobile won every single one of them. Several were close though, like 5G consistency, where Verizon was within a half percentage point.
FASTEST WIRELESS CARRIER IN CITIES, STATES: Outside of general scores from each carrier, Ookla’s report tested each in the 100 most populous cities in the US as well as all 50 states. T-Mobile took the crown in 67 of the 100, while 29 cities were “too close to call.” As for the states, T-Mobile won again in 46 states, while Verizon owned North Dakota.
If you need commentary here, it’s that T-Mobile has remained in the lead for some time and just as we think Verizon or AT&T are moving closer to them, we then see a report like this. T-Mobile wins almost every single one of these reports and the numbers often aren’t that close.
But as we like to remind you, the best carrier for you may not be the one who wins reports like these. The best carrier for you is the one whose network gives you the best experience where you live. Thankfully, you can test almost all of them for free.
