Who Has The Fastest LTE Service?

March 20, 2013, 1:12 pm         NYTimes

By ROY FURCHGOTT

RootMetricsFrom top, LTE coverage maps from RootMetrics for Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. AT&T’s network was the fastest by a clear margin.

 

Which cellular carrier’s LTE data service is the fastest?

Since LTE is a technical standard, you might expect them all to be pretty equal. But to paraphrase George Orwell, some LTE networks are more equal than others. And all of those fancy features on your smartphone are meaningless if they are on a balky network.

RootMetrics, a company that tests mobile network performance, did a survey in 77 cities, taking more than 725,000 samples to see how well various carriers perform.

The short answer is that AT&T had the fastest LTE network by a clear margin. The second-fastest was Verizon, followed by Sprint.

Before looking more closely at the results, keep in mind that these are averages from far-flung cities. That means you should take the results with a boulder-size grain of salt. The national average does not matter if there is no tower near you. Always check with co-workers, friends and neighbors to see how good their reception is before you buy.

An important tip is to ask people to install the RootMetrics or Ookla apps for Android or iOS for a test. These apps measure how fast a network is transmitting data to a phone. That will give you an idea of network speed where you are, and also give you a relative idea of what the megabits per second (Mbps) figures mean.

In the RootMetrics test, AT&T was in 47 of the 77 tested markets. It averaged download speeds of 18.6 Mbps, and uploads of 9 Mbps. It also had the second fastest non-LTE network, with downloads of 4.3 Mbps and uploads of 1.1 Mbps.

Verizon was in all 77 tested markets, and has the largest LTE network. Its average download speed was 14.3 Mbps, and upload speed was 8.5 Mbps. Its non-LTE average download speed was 0.9 Mbps, and the average upload speed was 0.7 Mbps.

Sprint had LTE in five of the 77 markets. Its download speed averaged 10.3 Mbps, and uploads averaged 4.4 Mbps. It’s non-LTE average speeds were 1.6 Mbps for downloads, and 0.7 Mbps for uploads.

T-Mobile gets an asterisk. Although it has no LTE service in the 77 cities tested, it offers a comparatively speedy sort of non-LTE service called HSPA+42. It averaged download speeds of 7.3 Mbps, and uploads of 1.5 Mbps. So even though it was slow by LTE standards, it is the fastest of the non-LTE services. If you are not in an LTE network area, this might be your fastest service.