New 5G report gives T-Mobile the crown over Verizon and AT&T

Opensignal has dropped its January 2022 5G User Experience Report after studying data from millions of devices from September to December 2021.

According to the report, it appears that of the three major cellular carriers (AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile) that T-Mobile leads 5G services as it pertains to availability (can confirm), reach, and download/upload speeds (also can confirm).

Verizon and AT&T have struggled lately, running into the wall that is the federal government on the launching of 5G C-band coverage. Verizon is also expanding its 5G UWB coverage, so it may be after that top spot next quarter.

This quarter though, Verizon was able to capture the 5G games experience and 5G voice app experience categories. AT&T is naturally the loser here, as it was pretending to have 5G for a while anyway.

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This isn’t a sponsored post for T-Mobile, but as a T-Mobile customer (after using both Verizon and AT&T in the recent past), the download speeds are legit.

According to Opensignal, the average T-Mobile 5G download speed climbed from 118.7 Mbps to a nice, rounded 150 Mbps.

Verizon came in second at 56.2 Mbps, AT&T doing the bare minimum at 49.1 Mbps. Upload speed differences were negligible for all three carriers, at 17.9 Mbps, 14.1, 9.9 for T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T respectively.

Availability, which is an important metric if you care about actually utilizing those monster download speeds, came in at 35.4% for T-Mobile, while AT&T (16.5%) beat out Verizon (9.5%) for not-as-good-as-T-Mobile.

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On the Opensignal report, you can drill down by city or region to check out how service is where you are. It should be noted that even though Verizon took two categories in the regional analysis, the differences between it and T-Mobile and AT&T were slight. Plus, most customers are more concerned with availability over latency as it pertains to gaming.

This 5G report comes after T-Mobile was recognized by Ookla (the company behind the SpeedTest you always use) as having the fastest mobile internet speeds. T-Mobile also gives stuff away on Tuesdays. The point is that as far as cellular phones are concerned, it’s fast.

Whether or not this all changes next quarter as Verizon and AT&T roll out their 5G initiatives doesn’t matter. This kind of competition is good for the consumer, as we’ll end up with better 5G coverage and speeds no matter where we go.

Unless, of course, you are an AT&T customer, whose speeds are such garbage in the 5G era that it’s a mystery how they have any customers left. If you haven’t switched from AT&T to literally any other carrier (even Mint Mobile) then you probably still use a CRT monitor and dial-up.

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Editors’ Recommendations:

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• The EU’s new Digital Services Act looks to severely limit the power of internet giants
• T-Mobile 5G is crushing Verizon and AT&T, study finds
• Verizon quietly launched a new program that collects a ton of customer data