USA

As U.S. carriers continue to hit new milestones in their 5G network rollouts, Opensignal has now conducted the most comprehensive analysis of smartphone users’ 5G mobile experience across the U.S. We included all 50 states and as many as 250 cities in this new study. While 5G was present to some extent everywhere, the quality of 5G experience varied significantly. Our 5G users on the East Coast generally had a better 5G experience, followed by users on the West Coast and in the Great Lakes region.

Business users were the first adopters of mobile phones in the 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, over the last decade the typical mobile user has been a consumer with the arrival of the modern smartphone. But mobile services have remained extremely important to business and more and more businesses have relied on mobile service to operate, especially during the many challenges of the last year.

When away from home or work, users have to choose what kind of connectivity best meets their needs. For years, users have connected to public Wifi at the first opportunity, under the assumption it was faster (and cheaper) than cellular. Opensignal’s latest analysis demonstrates that the arrival of 5G means this is no longer always the case in the U.S.

Many different kinds of 5G service are now available. Most carriers have launched an early version of 5G technology that continues to rely on the availability of 4G service and access to the legacy 4G core network. This is called non-standalone access (NSA). But for most of the planned benefits of 5G — beyond speed alone — carriers need to offer standalone access (SA) where a smartphone connects exclusively to 5G signals and uses a modern 5G core network.

Opensignal has previously analyzed the real-world 5G experience of our users across mobile operators in a number of countries globally, including Australia, the U.S., Taiwan and South Korea.