Three 5G battles, one clear champion
That’s already a pretty worrying stat for the nation’s largest wireless service provider, but things only get worse for Verizon when looking at the 5G availability and 5G speed sections of the latest RootMetrics study.
T-Mobile also keeps Verizon and AT&T at arm’s length in the 5G download speed department with 69 trophies, although that number is actually way down from 85 gold ribbons secured during the first six months of last year. Both Verizon and AT&T have clearly managed to vastly improve their 5G speeds in many areas with the help of recently acquired and deployed C-Band spectrum, but the silver and bronze medalists will need a lot more progress in the future to even hope to end up playing in the same league as T-Mobile… at some point.
And the overall winner is…
Ma Bell also tied Verizon for first place in the text category, while Verizon tied T-Mobile for the network accessibility crown. Somewhat surprisingly, AT&T and Verizon were statistically tied for the overall mobile performance title, but it’s hard not to see Ma Bell as the one true winner here.
Magenta has a lot to worry about when it comes to its overall metro area performance as well, with Verizon actually in the lead there thanks to a towering combination of an unrivaled 4G foundation and a fast-improving 5G layer on top of that. At the state level, AT&T managed to edge out Verizon with 249 to 229 awards while T-Mobile only won 76 trophies, which is certainly not a great number however you look at it.
But T-Mo can at least be happy with once again producing the greatest US median download speed score… by a landslide. But even in that category, it’s hard to ignore Verizon and AT&T’s solid progress from 77.9 and 77.3 Mbps to 111.9 and 108.9 Mbps respectively. Of course, both those figures remain far behind Magenta’s 250 Mbps speed average, which is itself up from 213.2 Mbps in H1 2023.
