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We're only a little over a week into 2024, and T-Mobile has already made headlines and generated both excitement and frustration for its fast-growing customer base with a number of official and not-so-official announcements. This incredibly eventful beginning of the year continues for the always busy "Un-carrier" today with another one of those comprehensive mobile network experience reports that seems to be as rosy as these things come for Magenta at first glance.
But if you look closer at the results of the latest nationwide tests conducted by Opensignal and compare them with the same firm's previous such research, you might conclude that T-Mo has at least a few major causes for concern while Verizon and AT&T are not doing (quite) as bad as you think.
The 5G speed battle is getting (a little) closer
This may sound bizarre or outright ridiculous, but both Verizon and AT&T can be (relatively) pleased with their latest 5G download speed scores of 135.3 and 123.5Mbps respectively despite being miles behind T-Mobile's towering (and milestone-achieving) 204.9Mbps result.
That's because Verizon and AT&T's gains from July 2023 are a lot larger than T-Mo's progress over the same period of time, perfectly illustrating the almost immediate impact of the silver and bronze medalists' recent C-band rollouts and suggesting this race could get even tighter down the line.
Of course, Magenta can only be delighted by the massive 5G speed advantage it continues to hold over its arch-rivals, with realistic hopes of seeing that 200+ Mbps test result further improved in the next couple of years with the help of various technological breakthroughs, world firsts, and good old expansions of existing mid-band spectrum to even more territories across the nation.
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For the time being, however, T-Mobile appears to have a bit of a 5G upload speed problem, losing that particular battle to Verizon quite clearly in Opensignal's newest report after breathing down Big Red's neck just six months ago.
On the bright side, the "Un-carrier" has somehow managed to extend its lead to both AT&T and Verizon as far as the overall download speed and upload speed experiences are concerned between July 2023 and January 2024. Since not everyone can find a 5G signal everywhere and all the time nowadays, those feel like the categories most speed addicts should primarily care about, and if you're in that camp, you might want to make sure you're connected to the best operator out there.
T-Mobile 9 - Verizon 5 - AT&T 1
That's the overall tally of the three big carriers' titles and trophies in this incredibly sweeping year-opening study, which highlights how far behind its competition remains AT&T and how close Verizon is getting to truly threatening T-Mobile's network experience supremacy.
While one could definitely argue that T-Mo's gold medals and crowns are shinier, flashier, and ultimately more important than those of its number one rival, you all should know better than to focus exclusively on download speeds. It's clearly hard to name T-Mobile as the 5G experience champion based on this particular set of data, which puts Verizon in first place for 5G video, 5G live video, and 5G gaming in addition to 5G upload speed.
Granted, the differences are a lot smaller in Big Red's favor in those charts than T-Mobile's huge 5G download speed advantage, and the same more or less goes for the overall video, live video, and games experience categories, all of which are won by Magenta.
That brings us to the coverage section of Opensignal's research, which is broken down into four equally important sub-sections. This is the only part of the report where AT&T (narrowly) comes out on top, beating Verizon by a measly 0.3 percentage points in terms of overall network availability.
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That doesn't even really qualify as a consolation win when you consider how ubiquitous 4G LTE connectivity has become over the last decade or so, which is clearly not what we can say about T-Mobile's thumping 5G availability victory. That's almost more impressive than the aforementioned 5G download speed triumph, especially when it's backed by a less comfortable but still clear-cut win in the 5G coverage experience field.
Finally, Verizon's overall coverage experience victory is largely offset by a network consistency loss to T-Mobile that seals the fate of the wireless championship for January 2024 once and for all. If you're not entirely sure what each of these performance indicators actually... means and is supposed to indicate, you'll obviously find all the details and explanations you need on Opensignal's website.
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Adrian, a mobile technology enthusiast since the Nokia 3310 era, has been a dynamic presence in the tech journalism field, contributing to Android Authority, Digital Trends, and Pocketnow before joining PhoneArena in 2018. His expertise spans across various platforms, with a particular fondness for the diversity of the Android ecosystem. Despite the challenges of balancing full-time parenthood with his work, Adrian's passion for tech trends, running, and movies keeps him energized. His commitment to mid-range smartphones has led to an eclectic collection of devices, saved from personal bankruptcy by his preference for 'adequate' over 'overpriced'.
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