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Network Verizon Businesses Communications Networking United States

Verizon and T-Mobile Are In a Virtual Tie For the Best Network In the US (androidcentral.com) 105

Posted by BeauHD from the neck-and-neck dept.
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.
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Verizon and T-Mobile Are In a Virtual Tie For the Best Network In the US More

Verizon and T-Mobile Are In a Virtual Tie For the Best Network In the US

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  • 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?

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

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:03AM (#53832129)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

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

          It's AT&T [att.com] 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 [t-mobile.com] 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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pizza ( 87623 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:16AM (#53831941) Homepage Journal

      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.

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

        • 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.

      • Re:I thought not all US carriers use LTE (Score:4, Informative)

        by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:33AM (#53832011) Homepage

        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 (Score:5, Informative)

          by msauve ( 701917 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:48AM (#53832067)
          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.
          • 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.

            • 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 t

              • 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.

              • 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

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                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

              • 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.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Higaran ( 835598 )
            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

          • 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, incl

          • 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.

            • 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.

        • 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 Man

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by swb ( 14022 )

            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.

        • 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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by schnell ( 163007 )

        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 a

      • 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+2

  • Speed ain't everything (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Matt Singer ( 4864977 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:29AM (#53831989)
    Speed doesn't matter is you have "zero bars"
    • 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.
      • I should mention that they are getting better, though, which is another reason I like them.
      • 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

    • 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.

      • 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 t

        • 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.

          • 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

            • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      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... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:38AM (#53832035)
    "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.

    • 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: (Score:1)

        by 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 w

        • 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)

        • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:01AM (#53832119) Journal
    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: (Score:1)

      by 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.

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

      • 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 contra

    • 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?

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

  • In other news, Bullroarer Took voted tallest Hobbit.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

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