The latest comprehensive report examining the state of the US wireless industry is out, but instead of comparing Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T’s download speeds and/or network availability to find out which of the nation’s major carriers comes out on top, RootMetrics is pitting a grand total of 125 cities against one another this time around to determine where you can get the best service.
Bigger can sometimes mean better
After ranking 12th out of 125 markets for the January – June 2020 timeframe, which was itself a pretty decent result, New York City has impressively taken the lead at the end of the year, eclipsing not only every other heavily populated metropolitan area in America but also much smaller cities like Lansing, Michigan and Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Philadelphia, for instance, dropped from a remarkable 50.1 Mbps aggregate median download speed to a… slightly less astonishing 44.6 Mbps, falling from second to third place among the fastest US cities, narrowly behind Seattle, Washington, which actually shaved a couple of megabits per second off its 47.4 average at the end of H1 2020 as well.
Mobile download speeds dropped even more drastically in cities like Cincinnati, Ohio, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Phoenix, Arizona, all of which managed to outperform NYC and Washington, D.C. in H1 but not H2 2020. 46.3 Mbps is the top aggregate median download speed of a single city for the year’s second half, down from 50.4 Mbps during the first six months of 2020.
While the most populated US city just so happens to be the fastest overall market this time around, a few of the nation’s other major metropolitan areas are still ranked very poorly in terms of their average speeds. We’re talking primarily about Miami and Houston, although Los Angeles and Dallas are not doing well either.
At the other end of the spectrum, Concord, California and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania join Lansing and Fayetteville as some of the small town standouts of H2 2020, with combined 4G LTE and 5G download averages of anywhere between 42.5 and 44 Mbps.
Verizon is mainly responsible for the highest speeds