4G LTE has brought blazingly fast Internet to our mobile devices, with speeds often even higher than what home Internet connections offer. However, not all carriers are equal in their offerings, and speeds can vary hugely on different carriers. Nowadays, most major US metropolitan areas are well covered, but speeds still differ hugely and while a carrier might deliver extremely high speeds in one area, in a different area it might deliver a much slower connection.
To see what is the current reality of US carriers’ cellular data speeds, we are comparing America’s top 4 carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. For this comparison we are looking separately at 4G and 3G speeds, as well as at latency. We have used data from the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the United States to come up with nation-wide averages (but you can also see the results per area). For the actual speeds, we are using publicly available data from OpenSignal's excellent maps. OpenSignal takes its data from over 1 million consumer devices, which is a great sample size. Here are the 20 metros we used for this comparison:
- New York
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
- Washington DC
- San Francisco
- Boston
- Philadelphia
- Dallas
- Miami
- Houston
- Atlanta
- Detroit
- Seattle
- Phoenix
- Minneapolis
- Cleveland
- Denver
- San Diego
- Portland
- Orlando
Tl;dr version
- T-Mobile is the fastest 4G network in the United States scoring first in the 20 out of 20 major metros that we measure
- AT&T and Verizon share the second place with very little differences in the 4G data speeds they offer
- Sprint is a distant fourth in terms of speed, and has a lot of catching up to do
- HOWEVER Verizon Wireless is the only one that has a 4G network that is LTE-only (not the slower HSPA+ standard) and it has the absolute best coverage
- AT&T is the closest runner-up in terms of coverage, while T-Mobile and Sprint fall far behind
- In terms of 3G speeds, T-Mobile and AT&T have the lead by a long shot
- In some markets, regional carriers do a better job than the major four
- 4G brings a 50% to 100% improvement in latencies
- Seattle scored the highest average 4G speeds: 15.85Mbps with T-Mobile
- New York City and San Francisco are some of the most congested 4G markets with some of the slowest 4G speeds
