Just a couple of days away, the annual championship of the NFL will kick off in Minneapolis. With a million visitors expected to attend the biggest sports event in the US, the city is in the midst of manic preparation to make sure all goes as planned on the big day.
Mobile operators are no exception. The national players have invested tens of millions of dollars in the past months to make sure their users get reliable and powerful connections in the Minneapolis area. Moreover, the Mall of America added no less than 1,200 antennas, 50 miles of cable and several temporary WiFi access points, according to the New York Times.
The city is in good shape. But not just because of the recent upgrades. As OpenSignal lead analyst, Kevin Fitchard told KSTP, “Minneapolis has been a very fast 4G city for some time. Additional upgrades ahead of the Super Bowl may boost speeds even more, which would be great news for Super Bowl attendees and the people of Minneapolis/St. Paul in general, but those upgrades aren’t responsible for its high ranking.”
Indeed, according to our analysis (which covered the July-September test period) of 35 metropolitan areas across the United States, Minneapolis ranked highest in terms of 4G speeds experienced by users with an average LTE download connection at 21.5 Mbps, almost twice as fast as what our users got in Las Vegas (11.65 Mbps), the slowest among the cities we examined.
Minneapolis isn't just the fastest city overall in the U.S. in our tests, each of the individual operators provide much faster connections in Minneapolis than on the national level. The fastest nationwide 4G speeds we measured were on T-Mobile's network, reaching 19.4 Mbps in the 4th quarter (as per our latest State of Mobile Networks report on the U.S.), while in Minneapolis users were able to get a connection almost 7 Mbps faster. Similarly, Verizon was able to offer speeds above 28 Mbps in Minneapolis, more than 60% faster than their national average 4G speed. In fact, all mobile operators were able to offer higher speeds in Minneapolis than in their national results by at least 25%.
Don’t take our word for it. Check your true connection speed with the OpenSignal app and share your experience with us on Twitter or in the comments below!
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