What you need to know
- Following data collected from September to December 2023, Opensignal crowns T-Mobile the best "Overall Experience" carrier on 5G for consumers.
- The Un-carrier offers an average download speed of 113.1Mbps and 12.1Mbps for upload, beating the competition by a wide margin.
- Regionally, T-Mobile remained quite dominant across the fifty states, though its competition jarred for space in a few areas.
Opensignal's new year mobile network report shows one carrier leading the pack for "consistent quality" based on data collected from September to December 2023.
According to the report, T-Mobile wins the Mobile Experience Award for all five "Overall Experience" categories. This is the second year in a row that T-Mobile has taken the award, achieving a score of 80.3%. Breaking things down, T-Mobile is well ahead of the competition in terms of average download speed on 5G, reaching a peak of 113.1Mbps.
Opensignal adds T-Mobile takes the category by offering a 2.5 times faster experience than AT&T, which delivers a median of 45.5Mbps. Verizon arrives in third place with 38.1Mbps.
T-Mobile leads the charge for average upload speed for 5G, as well, averaging 12.1Mbps. Verizon takes second place with 8.2Mbps and AT&T rounds it out with 6.5Mbps.
The remaining three categories on the 'Overall Experience' featured a closer race, but the Un-carrier still managed to snag the win. In the National analysis, T-Mobile scored 62 out of 100 on Opensignal's scale. For Live Video, the carrier received a score of 59.3 with AT&T slowly creeping up with 56.4. Lastly, T-Mobile took the "Games Experience" crown with a score of 71.0 nationally.
Regionally for download speeds, T-Mobile wipes out the competition across most of the 50 states; save for Vermont, which was split with AT&T. States that favored T-Mobile for a better upload speed experience were dominant, though Verizon jarred for space with the Un-carrier in a couple of areas.
T-Mobile's dominance amongst its competitors was seen back in July 2023 when Ookla reported its mobile carrier speed test findings. Across the U.S., the cellular service achieved a median 5G download speed of 220 Mbps and 164.76 Mbps without a 5G connection.
The service was also the fastest across most of the 50 states, however, latency was a closer race.
Despite leading the category, T-Mobile latency was reported at an average of 51ms on 5G. At the time, Ookla couldn't identify a clear winner for "5G consistency" as T-Mobile achieved a 75.9% experience rating with Verizon right on its heels with 75.1%.
