“You’re sitting in a coffee shop, your eyeballs glued to the phone. YouTube is open, and you’re waiting for the latest comic-book movie trailer to load. Instead, you get the oh-so-familiar circular loading icon instead,” Roger Cheng reports for CNET. “And it keeps spinning and spinning. It’s at these moments that you wonder if the time has come to switch wireless carriers. But which carrier? Each of them claims to be some variation of fastest, most reliable or even newest. It’s tough to cut through the noise.”
“Testing firm OpenSignal has some answers, with a surprising contest for the top spot,” Cheng reports. “T-Mobile earned top honors in the firm’s first US-dedicated report, released Tuesday. It took home awards for the speed and responsiveness of its 3G network. Verizon won for 4G coverage, and both carriers shared 4G speed honors.”
“OpenSignal collects its data from regular people who download its app, similar to Speedtest.net by Ookla, and for this study boasted more than 180,000 participants,” Cheng reports. “T-Mobile’s network tested at an average speed of 12.3 megabits per second, just above the 12 megabits-per-second speed offered by Verizon’s. But because of the slight difference, OpenSignal declared it a statistical dead heat and gave each the 4G speed award. The firm noted that T-Mobile ‘”barely edged out’ Verizon in the 11 largest cities.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As always, it depends on the network available where you live and work. Speed is nice, but worthless without coverage.