The report that T-Mobile CEO John Legere has been waiting for is finally here. According to OpenSignal’s crowdsourced data from the second half of 2013, T-Mobile provides the fastest LTE speeds of any carrier in the United States.
These results are in stark contrast to those of two studies we covered earlier this month, which ranked T-Mobile near the bottom of the pack. Of course, as Legere repeatedly told the press, those studies were dependent on much older data. Using the most recent data, OpenSignal puts T-Mobile above AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
Collecting data from 6 million users, OpenSignal focused on the download speeds and the time spent with access to an LTE network. Although T-Mobile’s 11.2 Mbps download speed considerably outpaced AT&T’s 8.9 Mbps and Verizon’s 7.6 Mbps, the time on LTE tells a different story. Verizon users were able to access LTE networks 77% of the time, while AT&T users had to settle for 69% and T-Mobile fell even further to 59%.
Legere has been vindicated. Speeds have clearly increased across the T-Mobile network, but unfortunately, that network is still much more constrained than Verizon’s and AT&T’s. Verizon’s “ink blots” might not paint an accurate picture of T-Mobile’s reach, but the scrappy carrier still has some work to do before its customers can maintain LTE connectivity anywhere they go.
