Alper Atakan – Affeder mi Aşk Bizi? Best FM Teknik Best recipe chocolate chip cookies Hattı Hizmetinizde! I’ve actually been here for every “G.
I’ve reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag. Phone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks. In 2022, T-Mobile isn’t just America’s fastest network, it’s also the best. For this year’s nationwide mobile network tests, we’ve changed everything. We drove more than 10,000 miles across the country with new software that tracks dropped calls and provides a better measure of reliability. That turned this year’s project into a search for America’s best mobile network—not just the fastest, as we’ve called this project in previous years.
For more, see “Our Testing Methodology” below. Look purely at speed, and the difference is even more stark. T’s entire advantage is in places where it has greater network reliability than T-Mobile. T-Mobile is also doing better than ever before in rural areas, although it gets docked slightly for still having more rural data dead zones outside the Northeast than the other two carriers do. Mobile internet is the internet, now more than ever as many people work from home and virtually everywhere else. 2018 and 2022, mobile data traffic in North America quadrupled from 22 exabytes to 86 exabytes. That’s almost 20 gigs of usage, per person, per month.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of noise around 5G. The carriers haven’t made anything easy or clear. They conflate different types of 5G with different performance characteristics. They claim very broad coverage for forms of 5G that act just like 4G. A lot of ratings are out there, and they’re confusing because they’re largely opaque. We started the Fastest Mobile Networks project aiming to be as transparent as possible. Each year, we show you exactly where we go, which devices we use and why, and give you every component of our overall scores.
We want you to have as much power here as possible when making a buying decision on a wireless carrier. On both T-Mobile and Verizon, the difference between 4G and 5G is becoming huge now, and it can be the difference between a stalled connection in a congested lane and speeding along in the HOV lane of mobile internet. T isn’t quite there yet, but it likely will be next year. T is launching later this year. Since we used new software this time around, our results aren’t directly comparable to those from previous years. But some trends are difficult to ignore. Both T-Mobile and Verizon see dramatically increased nationwide speeds this year as they expand their mid-band 5G networks.
T’s speeds decline, as it has added very little capacity while data demands grew. The speed results and dropped-call results appear completely decoupled. In general, all three carriers show very low rates of dropped calls in cities. T is noticeably more reliable on calling in rural areas—able to keep that little bit of voice connectivity going even if there isn’t massive data capacity for streaming and gaming. We use people, not square miles, to determine our scores. Smartphones are ubiquitous in America now, and since 2010, we’ve been giving you the most transparent, consistent measurements to help you choose your carrier.
But it’s completely legitimate to wonder why you need more than 100Mbps on your smartphone at all. First, that average speed also tends to define the floor. You may not feel you need 100Mbps, but you probably always want at least 25Mbps, and those greater average speeds tend to link up with more consistently reliable minimums. But also, both T-Mobile and Verizon are selling home internet service now. That’s where you really will want 100Mbps or more, and our results show where you can probably get it. It’s always good to ask your friends and neighbors how well the service works or to test drive a unit yourself. But some solid third-party scores can really help you decide whether it’s a service worth considering.
In the cities, T-Mobile has by far the least connections under 50Mbps, and it really pulls away from the competition in connections between 300 to 600Mbps, which is the mid-band 5G zone. Looking at dropped calls in the cities, the results are all over the map. In the Northeast, coverage is solid. On parts of our drives, we were able to check whether our phones were showing 4G or 5G, and what kind of 5G.
T-Mobile showed the best 5G coverage—and the best high-quality 5G coverage—in both cities and rural areas. And the same goes for cities. Mid-Band RulesT-Mobile’s winning secret is mid-band 5G, which it calls “ultra capacity. The math of wireless network performance can be pretty simple: Use more airwaves with more reach and you have more performance. With its purchase of Sprint in 2020, T-Mobile nabbed a massive cache of spectrum that it has quickly repurposed for 5G. That spectrum can reach a few miles from a tower, in best-case circumstances, so it’s good for covering cities and suburbs.