State of Mobile Networks: USA (February 2016)

The U.S. is a land of big frontiers, and so its networks have a lot of ground to cover. According to OpenSignal's most recent data, U.S. operators have done an exceptional job at providing consistent mobile data availability to their customers. U.S. LTE networks are now among the most extensive in the world, but in terms of speed the U.S. finds itself falling short. Drawing on measurements from 182,000 OpenSignal users, we compared the overall 3G and 4G performance of all four nationwide operators and how their LTE networks stacked up in the largest cities.

Highlights

T-Mobile defies the coverage critics

T-Mobile traditionally has fallen short of its larger rivals Verizon and AT&T in coverage, but it's a problem CEO John Legere has vowed to fix. Our most recent data shows he's making good on that promise. T-Mobile's LTE availability increased to 81% in the fourth quarter. It now nearly matches AT&T in LTE availability and is closing the gap with Verizon.

The U.S. has lost its technology edge

New LTE-Advanced networks have started pushing the upper boundaries of LTE download speed beyond 30 Mbps, but the U.S. is not one of the countries making that innovation leap. In fact, the U.S. 4G average of 9.9 Mbps falls well short of the global download average of 13.5 Mbps. Though U.S. 4G networks continue to get faster, they're just not keeping up with the world's quickening LTE pace.

4G availability is among the world's best

All four major operators saw improvements to their network reach in the last quarter, the result being that overall U.S. 4G subscribers can now see an LTE signal 81% of the time. Crossing the 80% availability barrier is something only seven other countries have achieved.

Verizon and T-Mobile battle for the speed crown

Verizon is still the operator to beat when it comes to network reliability, but T-Mobile is squaring off against the super-carrier in download speed. Nationally both operators are averaging 4G connections of 12 Mbps, and in a speed comparison in the 11 largest U.S. cities, T-Mobile just barely edged out Verizon. AT&T and Sprint hardly even factored in the contest.

Opensignal Awards Table

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

AT&T

Sprint

medal

T-Mobile

medal medal medal

Verizon

medal medal

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Performance by Metric

Download Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: 3G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Latency: 4G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Latency: 3G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Availability: 4G

This metric shows the proportion of time Opensignal users have an LTE connection available to them on each operator’s network. It's a measure of how often users can access a 4G network rather than a measure of geographic or population coverage.

Analysis

The U.S. is a bit of a 4G enigma. It was one of the first countries to launch LTE back in 2010, and in the intervening five years it’s built one of the most extensive mobile broadband infrastructures in the world. U.S. 4G subscribers can expect to connect to an LTE network 81% of the time. According to our upcoming State of LTE report, the U.S. ranks among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of availability, which is all the more impressive considering its broad geography. Most of its peers in the top 10 tend to be small and densely packed countries like Singapore and South Korea. (Though T-Mobile and AT&T refer to their HSPA networks as 4G, we use the term 4G solely to describe LTE networks.)

But that same network robustness doesn’t apply to 4G capacity. The U.S. is falling far behind globally in LTE speed. As many other countries start providing consistent 20 Mbps or greater connections, the U.S. average is 9.9 Mbps. That puts it in the same league as Argentina, a country that launched its first LTE network a year ago. That’s not to say that U.S. operators are delivering a poor LTE experience to their customers — 10 Mbps is more than enough to power any app on a smartphone — but the U.S. clearly is no longer pushing mobile technology boundaries like it used to. Before we delve deeper into the reasons why, let’s take a closer look at the dynamics of the U.S. market.

T-Mobile begins to deliver on coverage promise

In a year-end blog post, CEO John Legere predicted that T-Mobile would surprise the world with the gains it made in coverage in 2015. Last year it started a nationwide rollout of LTE on the 700 MHz airwaves — low frequency spectrum intended to boost its coverage both outside of cities and into the hard-to-reach interiors of buildings. According to our measurements, T-Mobile is delivering on Legere's boasts. In the fourth quarter, T-Mobile had an LTE availability (*) of 81%, which means its 4G customers were able to see an LTE signal 81% of the time in our tests (for more information on availability see our methodology page). T-Mobile's recent improvements now put it a little more than a percentage point away from matching AT&T in LTE network availability and helped it close the bigger gap between itself and Verizon. Sprint brought up the rear with an availability of 70%.

In past reports, T-Mobile has bested all operators in speed, but in the fourth quarter T-Mobile and Verizon were almost evenly matched. T-Mobile's 12.3 Mbps LTE average just barely edged out Verizon’s average of 12 Mbps, making it a statistical tie (AT&T and Sprint didn’t even come close). We delved deeper into our data to compare LTE speeds in the eleven biggest metro areas and found Verizon and T-Mobile battling out just as intensely on the local level. T-Mobile won the contest in four markets and Verizon won it in three, while three cities were statistical draws between the two (the 11th market, Houston, was a statistical tie between all four nationwide operators). Verizon still has the advantage in availability. It's king when it comes to reliability, scoring an availability metric of 87%.

Latency: Often overlooked, but critical to VoLTE

One final metric we would like to explore is latency, which measures the time it takes for data to make a round trip through the network. Low latency is important to overall quality of experience on a smartphone — webpages start loading faster — but it's critical to voice over LTE (VoLTE) as a lower network reaction time means a better quality call. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have all begun moving their voice traffic from 2G to LTE networks. Surprisingly, though, the operator with the lowest latency is the one major provider that currently has no VoLTE services, Sprint.

That transition to VoLTE could help U.S. operators solve their 4G capacity problems. The majority of voice calls still go over 2G networks, but as U.S. operators move that traffic over to LTE they can start shutting down 2G networks and use that spectrum for 4G. T-Mobile recently stated that 40% of all its voice calls are now VoLTE calls. One of the reasons T-Mobile has made such big speed gains in recent years is it has been gradually turning off its 2G networks and putting that spectrum to work in its LTE network.

LTE Advanced boost hampered by spectrum

The U.S. won't catch up with the rest of the world solely through cannibalizing its 2G networks though. Its problems are a bit deeper, and they're both political and technological. One of the main reasons why countries in Europe and Asia have been able to deploy such ultrafast networks is that they're tapping into new and larger blocks of spectrum that can support much more 4G capacity and much faster connections. Furthermore, many of these international operators have been quite aggressive in their pursuit of new technology. They're using LTE-Advanced techniques to tie multiple spectrum bands together, allowing them to boost individual device speeds even higher.

The last major 4G spectrum auction in the U.S. was in 2008, and in the last few years most U.S. operators have been adding to their holdings through acquisitions and trades. As for LTE-Advanced, its use in the U.S. has been fairly limited, in part because U.S. operators don't have big blocks of spectrum to tie together. Another problem is the success of U.S. operators in signing up 4G subscribers over the last five years. So many customers competing for limited capacity means that average connection speeds are driven down.

There's still hope that the U.S. can get back in the global LTE speed race. This year the Federal Communications Commission plans to auction off a major chunk of the broadcast TV airwaves for mobile broadband use. Depending on how much spectrum is released and when it becomes available (it may very well be reserved for future 5G networks), U.S. operators could use those frequencies to reach parity with the world's LTE speed demons. But until then, the U.S. may well have to be content with being the tortoise of the 4G world: slow but reliable.

(*) Editor’s note: When this report was originally published OpenSignal used the term time coverage for what is now our availability metric. We changed the name to avoid confusion of this metric with geographic and population coverage metrics, and we have reflected that change in our old reports. The new terminology, however, does not reflect a new methodology. Time coverage and availability represent the same measurement: the proportion of time OpenSignal users can connect to a particular network.

Our Methodology

Opensignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 3 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide.

Our measurements are collected at all hours of the day, every day of the year, under conditions of normal usage, including inside buildings and outdoors, in cities and the countryside, and everywhere in between. By analyzing on-device measurements recorded in the places where subscribers actually live, work and travel, we report on mobile network service the way users truly experience it.

We continually adapt our methodology to best represent the changing experience of consumers on mobile networks and, therefore, comparisons of the results to past reports should be considered indicative only. For more information on how we collect and analyze our data, see our methodology page.

For this particular report, 376,893,289 datapoints were collected from 181,927 users during the period: 2015-10-01 - 2015-12-31.

For every metric we've calculated statistical confidence intervals and plotted them on all of the graphs. When confidence intervals overlap for a certain metric, our measured results are too close to declare a winner in a particular category. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.

Opensignal Limited retains ownership of this report including all intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis. Reports produced by Opensignal Limited may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed, published for any commercial purpose (including use in advertisements or other promotional content) without prior written consent.