Verizon

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.

It's been a tumultuous 18 months for the U.S. mobile industry. Verizon and AT&T reintroduced unlimited data plans sending their 4G speeds on a rollercoaster ride. T-Mobile asserted itself at the top of our rankings, climbing to first place in all of our metrics, while Sprint asserted itself at the bottom, nearly catching up to rival AT&T.

Our latest national report on the State of Mobile Networks in the U.S. recognized T-Mobile as the winner in almost all of our categories, but it certainly wasn't for a lack of competition. Verizon took second place in several of our key metrics, in some cases by the narrowest of margins.

Last week OpenSignal unveiled a new experimental metric called average peak speed, which is designed to gauge a network’s full data connection capabilities under optimal conditions. We kicked off our analysis of peak speed with a look at India’s four nationwide LTE operators, but in conjunction with OpenSignal’s State of Mobile Networks: USA report, released today, we’re applying our peak speed metric to the U.S. big four.

The Motor City had the fastest LTE speeds in our new U.S.