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T-Mobile Has Thousands More 5G Cities Than Verizon and AT&T, Ookla Says
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T-Mobile has thousands more 5G cities than Verizon and AT&T, Ookla says [cnet.com]:
T-Mobile has almost 20 times more 5G cities than AT&T and Verizon combined [speedtest.net], according to a new analytics report by Ookla. T-Mobile is sitting on 5,013 cities with 5G [cnet.com] -- and that's before adding in the former 5G sites of Sprint [cnet.com] after the carrier's $26.5 billion merger with Sprint [cnet.com] -- while AT&T has 237 5G cities and Verizon has 39.
Verizon was by far the fastest in speeds, though, charting at a speed score of 870 in comparison to AT&T's 78 and T-Mobile's 64 in Ookla's report.
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"Only T-Mobile is doing the hard work to deliver 5G coverage and performance. Sure, it would be easier to deliver blazing speeds in postage stamp-sized areas like Verizon, but our strategy is different," said Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile. "T-Mobile's strategy is built on delivering a meaningful 5G experience [t-mobile.com] people can actually use."
Read more: Verizon vs. AT&T vs. T-Mobile vs. Sprint compared: How to pick the best 5G carrier for you [cnet.com]
There are now 5,164 cities across the US with 5G, according to Ookla.
A study last week by OpenSignal similarly found Verizon's 5G network to have the fastest speeds while T-Mobile had the best coverage [cnet.com].
Verizon commented T-Mobile's 5G performance is the same as what Verizon's customers get using 4G LTE. "Our customers get a great 4G LTE network and the fastest 5G network," a Verizon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
AT&T says T-Mobile is comparing apples with oranges by counting all individual towns within a metro area to arrive at that 5,000+ number. For example, AT&T counts Boston as one metro area as opposed to counting the towns of Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newtown, etc. A fairer comparison, according to AT&T, is that its 5G networks cover 179 million people [cnet.com] in comparison to T-Mobile's 225 million people. You can check out T-Mobile's 5G coverage maps here [t-mobile.com] and AT&T's 5G maps here [anrdoezrs.net].
AT&T also says it's 5G network covers 355 cities [att.com], not 237 as stated by Ookla's report.
The three carriers also use different radio waves for their 5G networks: Verizon uses high-band millimeter-wave 5G spectrum, while AT&T uses 850MHz spectrum for its low-band 5G network. AT&T will also be employing a new technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing to share its 4G airwaves with 5G and improve performance [cnet.com] this summer. T-Mobile also uses low-band 600MHz but is now also integrating Sprint's midband 2.5GHz spectrum.
High-band 5G networks provide fast speeds but limited coverage; low-band 5G has better coverage spread, but slower speeds. Mid-band is a combination of both.
Verizon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
