(Credit: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images)
A new study of ISP performance offers one result that should be useful to people across the US and one that’s only relevant in a subset of the country.
Ookla’s latest Speedtest Connectivity Report, released Thursday, draws on data from that firm’s Speedtest bandwidth-testing app to crown T-Mobile as the fastest mobile carrier in the US and AT&T Fiber as the fastest fixed broadband provider.
The report offers an unambiguous thumbs-up to T-Mobile, giving it a “Speed Score” of 222.63 that about doubles Verizon’s 113.2 and AT&T’s 111.07. The median download speeds that fed into that metric: 212.77Mbps at T-Mobile, 95.08Mbps at AT&T, and 86.23Mbps at Verizon.
T-Mobile’s advantage persists in 5G median network download speeds: T-Mobile at 281.52Mbps; Verizon 199.1Mbps; AT&T 140.09Mbps. T-Mobile’s early lead at putting fast mid-band 5G spectrum into service, which it markets as “Ultra Capacity” 5G, continues to pay off.
But while T-Mo also leads Ookla’s 5G availability rankings at 89.4%, that metric shows a vast gap between AT&T (86.2%) and Verizon (49.3%) that doesn’t surface in other tables in this post. The key to interpreting those numbers: They count any 5G connection, not whether it was on speedier spectrum like T-Mobile’s mid-band and AT&T and Verizon’s C-band or on low-band 5G that may not be much faster than 4G.
Those are numbers wireless customers should consider carefully.
But while most Americans have a choice of wireless carriers, the selection of wired residential providers on any block is much smaller. That makes Ookla’s nod to AT&T Fiber a non-factor to people outside of that company’s service footprint and even those inside the non-fiber parts of it where AT&T is instead rolling out fixed-wireless broadband.
That Dallas telecom firm holds an outsized lead in Speed Scores: 367.05, far above Verizon’s 277.41, Comcast Xfinity’s 251.32, Cox’s 250.01, and Spectrum’s 247.81. Ookla didn’t break out the math behind that metric, but it must weigh downloads heavily to give such a high ranking to cable ISPs with upload speeds that trail far behind what fiber delivers.
Ookla’s study also seems to repeat a questionable practice from a speedtest report last summer: only assessing AT&T’s fiber while lumping Verizon’s Fios in with that company’s slower 5G fixed wireless and legacy digital subscriber line service.
On the other hand, median download speeds of 357.45Mbps at AT&T Fiber understate what that network can do, considering that AT&T started selling 2Gbps and 5Gbps service in 2022.
A series of tables in Ookla’s report offer samples of state- and city-specific performance that reveal Google Fiber as a local favorite when it’s available. Google’s fiber broadband was the fastest option in Texas and North Carolina and in Charlotte, Durham, and Raleigh, NC; Austin, TX; and Irvine, CA.
Ookla also gauged customer sentiment about these providers, and the results suggest customers will put up with a fair amount in return for a fast connection: T-Mobile had the highest mobile-consumer sentiment score, 3.7 out of 5, despite jacking up rates on many older phone plans with scant notice last year, and AT&T’s massive data breach last year did not leave a visible dent in its top-ranked wireless consumer sentiment score of 3.74.
Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.
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