New OpenSignal Report Is Really Good News for T-Mobile

T-Mobile's 700MHz rollout is making a big difference. According to a new study from wireless testing firm OpenSignal, T-Mobile'south LTE coverage now "most matches AT&T...and is closing the gap with Verizon."

T-Mobile also won the virtually awards out of the four carriers in OpenSignal'south latest "Country of Mobile Networks: The states" report, which came out today and involves tests from Oct. one to Dec. 31, 2022. The nation's No. 3 carrier (you see what I did at that place) won awards for everyman 3G latency, as well as 3G and 4G download speed.

Verizon is still the coverage leader for LTE, with its subscribers having access to LTE 86 percentage of the time, OpenSignal says. But T-Mobile users now go LTE 81 percent of the fourth dimension, which the firm says is very good. T-Mobile and Verizon tied on 4G LTE speed, with AT&T and Sprint falling far behind.

OpenSignal's numbers stand in sharp contrast to a Nielsen report Dart was touting final week. Nielsen uses an app that runs in the background on Android phones, gauging how fast apps like Facebook and YouTube are collecting data. T-Mobile's Binge On plan gets interpreted by Nielsen's systems equally throttling video traffic to ane.5Mbps, lowering T-Mobile's overall results.

That doesn't explicate why Nielsen saw Sprint results every bit and so much college than OpenSignal did, though. In the almost egregious example I noted, Sprint says it has a median download speed of 20.8Mbps in Houston, but OpenSignal says information technology only has nine.8Mbps "boilerplate." Our sis company Ookla's Speedtest.net has even more different results, with a fifteen.2Mbps average and vii.75Mbps median for Dart in Houston. (The big difference between the boilerplate and the median ways there were fewer very fast results and more slow results.)

OpenSignal agrees that Dart got faster over the second half of this year, though.

OpenSignal February Speed Results

In the confusing, competitive realm of network testing, OpenSignal has some valuable things to contribute. Dissimilar Root Metrics, information technology's oversupply-sourced, so its data is relatively electric current. Dissimilar Nielsen, information technology doesn't get tripped upwardly by T-Mobile's Binge On plan. And dissimilar Speedtest.cyberspace, information technology measures coverage too as speed. OpenSignal also has disadvantages: a smaller crowd than Ookla, no testing of real applications like Nielsen, and no testing calls or texts the way Root does.

We're Not So Smashing After All
OpenSignal can't seem to write a report without ragging on U.S. networks in some means, and this time information technology criticizes all of our LTE networks for having bully coverage, but being very slow compared to newer networks in other countries.

The issues, the company says, are that countries with newer LTE networks tend to have larger blocks of spectrum dedicated to them, and that the U.S. was far enough ahead of the LTE curve that the networks are conveying more users than networks in other countries.

Apart from the international bragging rights, OpenSignal'southward written report shows that T-Mobile's work to extend its LTE coverage has really paid off, and it hasn't been at the expense of speed. For Sprint, though, in that location's a scrap of a fog of state of war effectually the success of its LTE Plus upgrade, one we hope to dispel with our own Fastest Mobile Networks drive-tests this May.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.