Lately, T-Mobile’s executives have been touting just how good their network is, saying that it is even better than Verizon’s network. Which a lot of people don’t believe, but now there is another report out, this time from Twin Prime, showcasing how great the T-Mobile network is now. The company has been testing the mobile performance of the four national wireless carriers in the US, and released their report covering the first half of 2016. And it’s pretty impressive, for T-Mobile.
Twin Prime is saying that T-Mobile does have the best network in terms of quality and performance. T-Mobile had the fastest average speeds on both 3G and 4G LTE networks. When it came to LTE, AT&T was 17% slower than T-Mobile, Sprint at 5% slower and Verizon just 1% slower. That’s pretty close for the four carriers, but when it comes to 3G, the differences were much greater. Verizon was 82% slower, Sprint 73% slower and AT&T was 55% slower. Now with AT&T and T-Mobile being GSM networks, they have a slight advantage over these CDMA networks, as they have the ability to use HSPA+ which is still technically 3G, but allows for faster speeds.
Response times is another metric that most people don’t look at, in terms of network performance, but it is just as important. T-Mobile, unsurprisingly, had the best response time in their report. Showing 52ms response time over LTE, and 75ms over 3G. Sprint came in second, actually, with 55ms over LTE and 114ms over 3G, followed by AT&T with 56ms over LTE and 117ms over 3G and finally Verizon had the worst response time, with 56ms over LTE and 118ms over 3G. On LTE, these response times are pretty close together, and you likely won’t notice a difference between T-Mobile’s 52ms and Verizon/AT&T’s 56ms, but it is still a difference that T-Mobile will tout.
T-Mobile launched their LTE network about 4 years ago now, and they’ve shot up from not having an LTE network at all to having the best, in that short amount of time. It really shows that their CTO, Neville Ray, is putting in some hard work with his team. Not only in building their LTE network but also expanding their existing coverage, largely thanks to the 700MHz spectrum they’ve been picking up in recent years.