T-Mobile

Spectrum is the oil of the wireless industry. Carriers need large quantities of spectrum to fuel the networks that support hundreds of millions of Americans using their smartphones many times every day to listen to music, stream video, or to communicate.

Some AT&T users in the U.S. have recently seen “5G E” appear on the status bar of their existing smartphones, replacing 4G. This move has sparked controversy because AT&T is using updated 4G network technologies to connect these smartphone users, not the new 5G standard.

One of the most controversial practices that mobile operators can be accused of is prioritizing certain types of network traffic over others, or limiting the quality of video which consumers can stream. Operators in the U.S. are often criticized for being heavy-handed in such network management practices compared with other countries, and these attacks often paint the operators as backward compared with the best mobile networks in other parts of the world such as Europe and Asia.

We recently published our latest report on the State of Mobile Networks in the U.S., where the network speed and 4G availability awards were dominated by a couple of operators. But AT&T won one notable accolade in OpenSignal's metrics – the best 4G latency.

With our summer U.S. report around the corner, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight a metric that will feature in OpenSignal's U.S. reports going forward. That metric is upload speed, and it's becoming an increasingly important measure of the consumer mobile data experience. When the 4G age dawned, download speed was king as it determined how quickly we could surf the internet and the quality of mobile video.