T-Mobile competed against some serious network overhauls on the part of rival carriers in Houston for this year’s Super Bowl, and managed to come out on top in sheer LTE speed and throughput. Using Ookla’s Speedtest app, arguably the gold standard for real-world speed testing, T-Mobile averaged up the scores from the great throng of users at this year’s Super Bowl for each carrier, and came up with the attached speed chart. With permanent network improvements in Houston to thank, T-Mobile came out on top, with their average LTE throughput reaching 53 megabits per second download, and 19 megabits per second upload. T-Mobile’s performance this year beat their score at last year’s Super Bowl, with the Un-Carrier’s network delivering about 150% improvement over last year’s results this year.
T-Mobile’s data throughput in total was around twice the amount that they saw last year, with far more customers on the network. Usage patterns put this year’s data usage past last year’s around the halftime mark of the game. According to T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray, if these patterns mirrored normal usage, each person would use an average of 24 gigabytes of data per month. The usage consisted mostly of sharing and posting to social media, but a surprising second was people using streaming services like YouTube and Netflix, despite being at an event where tickets cost well into the thousands. The game-winning touchdown was reportedly the biggest moment to share, with the aftermath showing a 15% spike in T-Mobile data usage. Customers also reportedly made three times their average amount of voice calls.
While some may argue that there may well have been far more Verizon and AT&T customers at this year’s event than there were T-Mobile customers, usual results, according to Ookla’s Speedtest app, were quite close, with nobody venturing above or below the 20 to 30 megabit per second area. For the big game, T-Mobile’s performance was followed closely by Sprint, who posted 52 megabits download and 9 megabits upload. Verizon got third place with 30 and 10 megabits, while AT&T rounded out the rankings with 27 and 14 megabit speeds. In the same press release where this information was outed, T-Mobile promised similar performance in Minneapolis, where next year’s Super Bowl is set to happen.