Kicking off the year and telling yourself that you might be ready to find a new wireless carrier isn’t a bad move. As you probably know, there is a never-ending battle to claim a 5G crown, even as all of the 5G promises from 5 years ago have never materialized. Still, the US wireless industry is at least starting to give us decent 5G connections for the most part and it’s never a bad idea to see who is offering what.
In a new 5G report provided by OK, we get a look at that status of 5G in Q4 of 2022 from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. This report examines overall network download and upload speeds, latency, consistency, video performance scores, before separating into 5G-specific categories for speed, availability, etc.
As has been the case for several OK reports like this, T-Mobile ran away with most categories. In the overall download speed category, they posted an impressive median speed of 151Mbps, while Verizon and AT&T fell in at 69Mbps and 65Mbps, respectively. Other categories were closer, like latency and consistency and video scores, but then T-Mobile distanced itself in the 5G breakout area.
For 5G performance, T-Mobile posted a median download speed of 216Mbps, while Verizon and AT&T produced speeds of 127Mbps and 85Mbps. Even for 5G availability, T-Mobile took the crown at 69%, with AT&T the closest at 64% and Verizon off in the corner at 34% (?!?).
Are you bored by those stats and would rather know about the city or state you live in? cool This report dives into all 50 states plus DC and the winner is T-Mobile in 46 of them. The other 5 were either a tie or AT&T won. As for cities, the report looked at 100 of the most populous cities, and yes, T-Mobile dominated with 86 wins. Verizon took honors in a single city and then 13 cities were too close to call.
And for those curious, here is a speedtest I ran this week in Portland on T-Mobile where I topped 1Gbps download speeds. I got the same score the week before. At the same location, my Verizon phone can barely hold a “5G” signal.
Finally, on a related note, the report shared the devices with the fastest median download speeds and the top two were the Galaxy Fold 4 and Pixel 7 Pro followed by the iPhone 14 Pro Max.
I’m not trying to sell you on T-Mobile, but I’m also trying to continue to remind you that those days of people complaining about T-Mobile having a dogs**t network are long gone. If you live anywhere near a city, they are likely the best carrier in terms of speed and 5G availability.