T-Mobile's 700MHz rollout is making a big difference. According to a new report from wireless testing firm OpenSignal, T-Mobile's LTE coverage now "nearly matches AT&T...and is closing the gap with Verizon."
T-Mobile also won the most awards out of the four carriers in OpenSignal's latest "State of Mobile Networks: USA" report, which came out today and involves tests from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2015. The nation's No. 3 carrier (you see what I did there) won awards for lowest 3G latency, as well as 3G and 4G download speed.
Verizon is still the coverage leader for LTE, with its subscribers having access to LTE 86 percent of the time, OpenSignal says. But T-Mobile users now get LTE 81 percent of the time, which the firm says is very good. T-Mobile and Verizon tied on 4G LTE speed, with AT&T and Sprint falling far behind.
OpenSignal's numbers stand in sharp contrast to a Nielsen report Sprint was touting last week. Nielsen uses an app that runs in the background on Android phones, gauging how fast apps like Facebook and YouTube are collecting data. T-Mobile's Binge On plan gets interpreted by Nielsen's systems as throttling video traffic to 1.5Mbps, lowering T-Mobile's overall results.
That doesn't explain why Nielsen saw Sprint results as so much higher than OpenSignal did, though. In the most egregious example I noted, Sprint says it has a median download speed of 20.8Mbps in Houston, but OpenSignal says it only has 9.8Mbps "average." Our sister company Ookla's Speedtest.net has even more different results, with a 15.2Mbps average and 7.75Mbps median for Sprint in Houston. (The big difference between the average and the median means there were fewer very fast results and more slow results.)
OpenSignal agrees that Sprint got faster over the second half of this year, though.
In the confusing, competitive realm of network testing, OpenSignal has some valuable things to contribute. Unlike Root Metrics, it's crowd-sourced, so its data is relatively current. Unlike Nielsen, it doesn't get tripped up by T-Mobile's Binge On plan. And unlike Speedtest.net, it measures coverage as well as speed. OpenSignal also has disadvantages: a smaller crowd than Ookla, no testing of real applications like Nielsen, and no testing calls or texts the way Root does.
We're Not So Great After All
OpenSignal can't seem to write a report without ragging on U.S. networks in some ways, and this time it criticizes all of our LTE networks for having great coverage, but being very slow compared to newer networks in other countries.
The issues, the company says, are that countries with newer LTE networks tend to have larger blocks of spectrum dedicated to them, and that the U.S. was far enough ahead of the LTE curve that the networks are carrying more users than networks in other countries.
Apart from the international bragging rights, OpenSignal's report shows that T-Mobile's work to extend its LTE coverage has really paid off, and it hasn't been at the expense of speed. For Sprint, though, there's a bit of a fog of war around the success of its LTE Plus upgrade, one we hope to dispel with our own Fastest Mobile Networks drive-tests this May.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.