Verizon also took home Opensignal’s first award for live video speeds via 5G
T-Mobile US continues to dominate 5G download speed and availability in Opensignal’s rankings, but Verizon narrowly beat out T-Mo on 5G upload speeds and maintained its lead in performance in terms of voice, gaming and video via 5G.
According to Opensignal’s newly released assessment of the 5G user experience, T-Mobile US provides 5G users (with a 5G subscription and device) with access to its 5G network nearly 60% of the time on a national basis; AT&T was the closest competitor at just 20.7% and Verizon came in at less than 10% availability on a national basis.
The numbers are a bit better for Verizon and AT&T on a state-level basis—for example, in California, AT&T provided 5G availability for users nearly 32% of the time, and Verizon came in at nearly 15%; US Cellular provided 5G for its California users almost 16% of the time, while T-Mobile US was at 58% availability. But even in geographically small areas like the District of Columbia, T-Mo provided 5G availability nearly 70% of the time, followed by Verizon at 18.2% and AT&T at 11.9%.
Data for the analysis was collected between mid-March and mid-June of this year.
In terms of speed, downloads were an eight-peat win for T-Mobile US, with a score of 195.5 Mbps — at least twice the speeds of its national competitors. However, Opensignal did note that all three of the national operators saw roughly 10 Mbps increases in their 5G speed scores from previous analysis.
T-Mo had also repeatedly taken home the upload speed award in previous testing, but Verizon landed that award this time with an “impressive increase” in 5G upload speeds to 18.5 Mbps, with T-Mo coming in just behind at 18.2 Mbps. AT&T lagged at 12.1 Mbps.
Verizon also kept its top spot in Opensignal’s assessments related to user experience in different popular tasks: Video user experience via 5G, voice and gaming. Opensignal also introduced a new testing category for “5G live video” such as music or sporting events, explaining that the metric “quantifies the quality of real-time video streamed to mobile devices by measuring video streams over an operator’s network.” Verizon won that new category with a score of 52.9 points out of 100, followed by T-Mobile US at 50.3 and then AT&T at 44.1.
Read the full analysis of the 5G experience on the national carriers’ networks from Opensignal here.
