T-Mobile leads 5G race for coverage and speed — and the gap is growing
In the early days of 5G, T-Mobile has scored some convincing wins when it comes to launching and extending its 5G network. And according to one third-party testing firm, T-Mobile’s lead on network size and speed is expanding.
Opensignal published its quarterly 5G user experience report for July, and T-Mobile 5G is the big winner when it comes to speed, availability and reach. Even better for the carrier, it’s outpacing the growth of rivals AT&T and Verizon for 5G download speeds.
5G coverage in the U.S. remains a work in progress, as carriers look to expand and improve the coverage first launched a little more than two years ago. You can expect a lot of jockeying for position as 5G coverage matures. But Opensignal’s new report is a helpful snapshot of where we are right now, and it paints a rosy picture for T-Mobile, which just last month announced that its 5G network now reaches 300 million people.
If you are getting 5G from T-Mobile, you’re seeing faster download speeds than you would from other carriers, according to Opensignal’s testing. Between March 16 and June 13 — the period covered for this report — Opensignal tallied 5G download speeds of 87.5 Mbps for T-Mobile. AT&T and Verizon had identical 52.4 Mbps averages.That gap is twice what it was when Opensignal published its 5G findings in April.
Put another way, T-Mobile’s average speed has increased by 16.3 Mbps since Opensignal’s last report. In that same time, Verizon’s 5G download speed ticked up 4.5 Mbps while AT&T’s actually fell by 2.7 Mbps. The rate of T-Mobile’s download improvement between July and April was also greater than how it improved between April and January of this year.
