T-Mobile’s 5G network just beat Verizon and AT&T (again)

By Cristina Alexander June 21, 2022

T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T always claim to be America’s best 5G network in their commercials. T-Mobile boasts this even more so, and as it turns out, it’s true. During PCMag’s annual Best Mobile Network test (previously known as the Fastest Mobile Network test), T-Mobile won over Verizon and AT&T as the Best Mobile Network for the second year in a row.

PCMag gave T-Mobile the title after testers drove 10,000 miles across the country to measure its performance against Verizon and AT&T. The test involved driving to 30 cities and six rural regions to test each mobile carrier’s reliability using Samsung Galaxy S22+ smartphones. As expected, T-Mobile won that contest in 18 cities out of 30, followed by Verizon with eight and AT&T with four.

Jaap Arriens / Getty Images

T-Mobile also outran its rivals in terms of speed, specifically upload and download speeds, backing up its slogan of being “America’s fastest 5G network.” The carrier was the fastest in 19 cities out of 30, compared to Verizon with nine and AT&T with two. PCMag’s report noted that T-Mobile is performing better in rural areas, but explained that it still has more rural dead zones in the Northeast than Verizon and AT&T do.

Recommended Videos

The reason T-Mobile left Verizon and AT&T in the dust is because of mid-band 5G — something that carrier built from Sprint’s airwaves after acquiring the company for $26 billion in 2020. That’s how T-Mobile was able to gain coverage in rural dead zones in the Northeast, despite falling short in the rural areas of the Northwest, Washington State, and Georgia.

Meanwhile, Verizon, and AT&T are rushing to close the gap between themselves and T-Mobile using mid-band 5G acquired at an auction in February 2021. While Verizon started running its 5G network right away, AT&T has been waiting for the equipment required to build it. The latter carrier hopes to have a 5G network up and running by next year.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Cristina Alexander

Gaming/Mobile Writer

Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…

Mobile

Were you affected by the AT&T outage? You may get some free money

Last Thursday was a bad day for AT&T. Early in the morning on February 22, AT&T's network went down for thousands of people across the U.S.. The network was offline for hours and outage reports on Down Detector peaked at nearly 75,000. It was eventually fixed, but the damage was still done. Thankfully, if you were among the many people impacted by the outage, we have some good news for you.

On February 24, AT&T published a page on its website called "Making it right." In short, if your AT&T service was down and you were affected by it, you're getting a discount on your next bill. The AT&T page reads as follows:

Mobile

Everything you need to know about the massive AT&T outage

Happy Thursday! February is drawing to a close, the weather is getting slightly warmer in parts of the country, and AT&T experienced a massive outage that affected its cellular and internet services. It was a bit of a mess.

How many people were without service? When was service restored? Here's a quick recap of what you need to know.
When did the AT&T outage start?
At around 4 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 22, more than 32,000 outages were reported across AT&T's network. Once 7 a.m. rolled around, that number jumped to over 50,000 people. Per the Down Detector website, there were nearly 75,000 outage reports just before 9:15 a.m. ET.
Is the AT&T outage over?
Thankfully, the AT&T outage has finally ended. At 11:15 a.m. ET, the company had restored "three-quarters" of its network. Then, at 3:10 p.m. ET, AT&T confirmed that it had "restored wireless service to all our affected customers."

Mobile

T-Mobile just set another 5G speed record

T-Mobile’s rivals may be nipping at its heels in the 5G race, but the Uncarrier is determined to stay ahead of the game. It not only boasts the fastest and most expansive 5G network in the U.S., but it’s actively working on technologies that will help it reach even greater peak speeds.

Two years ago, T-Mobile used a relatively new technique known as 5G Carrier Aggregation (5G CA) to achieve the kind of 3Gbps download speeds on midband frequencies that had previously been the exclusive domain of extremely high (and extremely short-range) mmWave technologies. Now, it’s chalked up another 5G first by taking advantage of the latest developments to shatter the traditional cap on upload speeds over sub-6GHz frequencies.
T-Mobile's newest 5G record