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While AT&T’s score is statistically unchanged since the previous report, our T-Mobile users saw their Games Experience improve by 1.5 points, meaning that T-Mobile now jointly wins the Games Experience award along with AT&T. The two carriers have statistically tied scores of 67.4 and 67.3 points (on a 100-point scale), respectively. In the last report in July 2021 AT&T was the sole winner of this award. While Verizon places third, its score is less than one point behind the two winners at 66.6 points.
Our users on T-Mobile experienced the fastest Upload Speed Experience as T-Mobile’s score was 10.5 Mbps compared with Verizon’s 8.2 Mbps and AT&T’s 6.7 Mbps. This was the only category where our users saw their experience statistically improve on all three carriers since the previous report as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon’s scores improved by 0.6 Mbps, 1.3 Mbps and 0.3 Mbps, respectively.
T-Mobile wins the Voice App Experience award with a score of 78.6, ahead of Verizon and AT&T which obtained statistically tied scores of 77.6 and 77.5 points (on a 100-point scale), respectively. All three operators scored Acceptable ratings, but they are not far off from a Good rating, which requires a score of at least 80 points.
With a score of 54.1 Mbps, T-Mobile wins the Download Speed Experience award. The carrier saw an extraordinary improvement in this metric after placing second in the previous report largely driven by 5G improvements, for example the use of the 2.5GHz band. AT&T has conceded the leading position to T-Mobile after placing first for four reports in a row and now comes second with 35.3 Mbps. Verizon remains in third place but is closing in on AT&T as it has also exceeded the 30 Mbps threshold having scored 30.2 Mbps.
Verizon holds the 4G Coverage Experience award with a near-perfect score of 9.9 on a 10 point scale, ahead of AT&T on 9.8 and T-Mobile's 9.4. However, it is T-Mobile that wins 4G Availability with an extremely narrow lead on Verizon as the two carriers scored 97.8% and 97.7%, respectively.
Understanding how the overall mobile network experience of all U.S. mobile users compare remains important because users still spend the vast majority of the time connected to older 4G network technologies, rather than 5G. In the new USA 5G Experience report, where we delve deeper into six categories of the 5G mobile experience, we found that our 5G users spent the highest amount of time connected to 5G services on T-Mobile at 35.4%. This means that even 5G users are still spending a significant proportion of their time connected to 4G networks, and that understanding the overall mobile network experience is still relevant despite U.S. carriers having launched their 5G networks more than two years ago.
However, it is evident that 5G is having a large impact on the overall experience scores, and that is particularly clear when we look at the progress that T-Mobile has made during 2021 in both 5G Download Speed and 5G Upload Speed — which resulted in the operator jumping ahead of AT&T in Download Speed Experience, and significantly increasing its lead in Upload Speed Experience compared to six months ago. With even more new spectrum capacity now being deployed for 5G usage, 5G will continue to raise the overall experience of users throughout 2022. For this report we have paused the Video Experience award while we refine the category to better reflect the impact of 5G and carriers’ 5G plans on mobile video streaming.
In this Mobile Network Experience report we include the overall experience for all smartphone users, but we also publish supporting metrics for 5G users' experience. The difference is that these 5G users results reflect the overall experience across all mobile technologies — 3G, 4G and 5G — of 5G users alone, while the overall results are the average scores across all smartphone users, whether or not they have 5G.
| Mobile Experience Awards USA | |||
|---|---|---|---|
January 2022,
USA Report
|
A
AT&T
|
T
T-Mobile
|
V
Verizon
|
Games Experience
| |||
Voice App Experience
| |||
Download Speed Experience
| |||
Upload Speed Experience
| |||
4G Availability
| |||
4G Coverage Experience
| |||
|
Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
January 2022,
USA
|
|---|---|
|
Voice App Experience
|
T
T-Mobile
|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
T
T-Mobile
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
T
T-Mobile
|
|
4G Availability
|
T
T-Mobile
|
|
4G Coverage Experience
|
V
Verizon
|
|
Mobile Experience Awards Draws
|
January 2022, USA
|
|---|---|
|
Games Experience
|
A
AT&T
T
T-Mobile
|
AT&T and T-Mobile share the Games Experience award as they scored 67.3 and 67.4 points (on a 100-point scale), respectively. T-Mobile previously placed third in this category, but has now forced AT&T into a statistical tie thanks to a 1.5 point increase since the previous report while AT&T’s score has not changed significantly. Verizon now places last with a score of 66.6 points but is less than a point behind the joint winners, meaning that the ranking could easily change in our future awards.
Opensignal’s Games Experience is a measure of how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-100, it analyzes how the multiplayer mobile gaming experience is affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter.
|
Games Experience
Additional Metrics |
A
AT&T
|
T
T-Mobile
|
V
Verizon
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | |||
|
Games Experience – 5G Users
| 66.5 (± 0.22) | 67.7 (± 0.14) | 70.7 (± 0.14) |
| Games Experience – 5G Users | in 0-100 points |
|
A
AT&T
|
67 (± 0.22) |
|
T
T-Mobile
|
68 (± 0.14) |
|
V
Verizon
|
71 (± 0.14) |
T-Mobile once again wins the Voice App Experience award with a score of 78.6 points, followed by Verizon and AT&T at 77.6 points and 77.5 points, respectively. Opensignal’s Voice App Experience reflects the use of over-the-top (OTT) voice communication apps, such asFacebook Messenger, Skype and WhatsApp. The model characterizes the exact relationship between the technical measurements and perceived call quality using a model derived from the International Telecommunications Union’s approach.
|
Voice App Experience
Additional Metrics |
A
AT&T
|
T
T-Mobile
|
V
Verizon
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | |||
|
Voice App Experience – 5G Users
| 78.1 (± 0.10) | 78.9 (± 0.06) | 79.4 (± 0.06) |
| Voice App Experience – 5G Users | in 0-100 points |
|
A
AT&T
|
78 (± 0.10) |
|
T
T-Mobile
|
79 (± 0.06) |
|
V
Verizon
|
79 (± 0.06) |
T-Mobile shows the largest improvement in download speeds among the U.S. carriers — an increase of 22.4 Mbps (70.5%) — and jumps ahead of AT&T to win the Download Speed Experience award with a score of 54.1 Mbps. AT&T and Verizon follow at some distance with 35.3 Mbps and 30.2 Mbps respectively. While Verizon’s score has improved by 1.5 Mbps since the previous report, our users on AT&T did not observe any statistical change to their experience.
Looking at the overall speeds as experienced by our 5G users, we saw much higher scores with our T-Mobile 5G users, who observed the fastest average speeds of 110.6 Mbps, followed by our Verizon and AT&T users with scores of 43.3 Mbps and 39.2 Mbps, respectively. These 5G user overall download speeds represent the average speed across all generations of mobile technology and the amount of time 5G users spend connected to each generation. The 5G users analyzed here have both a 5G smartphone model and a 5G tariff plan.
|
Download Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
A
AT&T
|
T
T-Mobile
|
V
Verizon
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | |||
|
Download Speed Experience – 5G Users
| 39.2 (± 0.17) | 110.6 (± 0.49) | 43.3 (± 0.13) |
| Download Speed Experience – 5G Users | in Mbps |
|
A
AT&T
|
39 (± 0.17) |
|
T
T-Mobile
|
111 (± 0.49) |
|
V
Verizon
|
43 (± 0.13) |
T-Mobile increases its lead in Upload Speed Experience, as our users on its network enjoyed a speed of 10.5 Mbps which is 2.3 Mbps (27.7%) faster than that seen by our users connecting with second placed Verizon, up from 1.4 Mbps (17.1%) in the previous report. In this report, Verizon and AT&T scored 8.2 Mbps and 6.7 Mbps, respectively — which were 0.3-0.6 Mbps faster than in our previous report.
However, when we focus on just our 5G users’ overall upload speeds on the three carriers, we see T-Mobile having a larger lead on its competitors. In fact, our 5G users on T-Mobile on average experienced 14 Mbps in upload speed which was 4.6 Mbps (49.1%) and 6.4 Mbps (84.2%) faster that what our 5G users experienced on Verizon and AT&T, respectively.
|
Upload Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
A
AT&T
|
T
T-Mobile
|
V
Verizon
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | |||
|
Upload Speed Experience – 5G Users
| 7.6 (± 0.05) | 14.0 (± 0.06) | 9.4 (± 0.04) |
| Upload Speed Experience – 5G Users | in Mbps |
|
A
AT&T
|
8 (± 0.05) |
|
T
T-Mobile
|
14 (± 0.06) |
|
V
Verizon
|
9 (± 0.04) |
T-Mobile remains the sole winner of the 4G Availability award but Verizon is just a breath behind as only 0.1 percentage points separates the scores of the two carriers. In fact, T-Mobile scored 97.8% while Verizon scored 97.7%. AT&T is also reducing its gap to the top position as it recorded the largest increase of 0.3 percentage points since our previous report.
Verizon wins the 4G Coverage Experience award with a near-perfect score of 9.9 on a 10 point scale. AT&T is second with 9.8 points followed by T-Mobile’s score of 9.4 points.
4G Coverage Experience measures the mobile coverage experience in all the locations that matter most to everyday users — i.e. all the places where they live, work and travel. It considers all the areas that Opensignal users visit, the portion of locations that 4G is available to them, and locations that more users visit have higher importance to them.
We have analyzed the mobile network experience across 43 U.S. states, plus the capital Washington D.C. — the same set as in our companion USA 5G Experience report. T-Mobile secures the largest number of regional awards, and by a large margin, as it wins 100 awards outright and shares an additional 63 awards with at least one of its competitors. AT&T and Verizon win outright 23 and 22 awards each, while having an additional 52 and 49 shared wins, respectively.
T-Mobile dominates both Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience as it wins 38 and 34 awards outright, respectively, in the two categories. T-Mobile also secures 41 regional Voice App Experience awards as well as 20 regional awards for Games Experience and 21 regional awards for 4G Availability — although most of the victories in these three categories were shared (54) with one or both its competitors.
AT&T excels in Games Experience as it wins outright 16 of the regional awards, while sharing victory in a further 16 states. AT&T also collects 21 regional awards in Voice App Experience, 16 awards in 4G Availability and six awards for Download Speed Experience.
Verizon maintains an edge in 4G Availability, as it is the carrier winning the largest number of awards (33) — both outright (12) and shared (21) — in this category. Verizon also collects 16 regional awards in Games Experience and 12 awards in Voice App Experience. Also, Verizon is the only operator, other than T-Mobile, that secures any regional Upload Speed Experience awards.
Select any region or city below to display individual breakdown
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
Opensignal is the mobile analytics company committed to improving mobile connectivity across the globe. We are the independent authority for understanding the true experience consumers receive on wireless networks.
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