Verizon, AT&T May Be Choking Unlimited Data Users

4G LTE speeds in the US are getting faster, but our wireless networks may exist choking down unlimited information users, according to a new written report from Ookla Speedtest. That makes T-Mobile the fastest mobile carrier in the US when looking at crowdsourced speed tests.

It isn't that simple, though. The written report notes that T-Mobile is still at the bottom for overall population coverage. Verizon has not bad coverage and speeds, just is throttling heavy data users. And AT&T and Sprint provide high speeds less consistently than the other two carriers, the report says.

Ookla speed scores

Ookla'due south new speed score isn't a sheer measure out of megabits downloaded. It incorporates low-stop, median and top-stop performance for both download and upload speed, to requite a bigger picture of overall speed. That's a like approach to the one we have in our ain Fastest Mobile Networks study.

Speed vs. Coverage

Ookla, which is owned past Ziff Davis, PCMag'southward parent company, didn't just expect at speed. By seeing where users were taking tests, it calculated that AT&T and Verizon still have better coverage than Sprint and T-Mobile. While the two bigger carriers cover 98-99 percent of the population, the smaller ones are 93-94 pct. That difference adds upwardly to about twenty million people.

Looking at the divergence between urban and rural areas, speed tests taken in metropolitan areas were noticeably faster than tests taken in rural areas. While 23 percent of Verizon's tests and 16.9 percent of AT&T'south tests were taken in rural areas, only 6.two percent of T-Mobile's tests were, the written report says.

T-Mobile is moving to close that gap this year through a hereafter partnership with U.S. Cellular and by building out a new 600MHz network on wireless spectrum it merely bought, the carrier told us.

Much equally we saw in our own results, Ookla found that the all-time carrier varies from urban center to urban center. T-Mobile won 40 of its elevation 100 cities, Verizon won 35, AT&T twenty, and Sprint five.

Some of the results can be a little surprising. T-Mobile took Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, a state that has historically been a weak area for that carrier. Dart, meanwhile, took Seattle, which is T-Mobile's home town and headquarters.

Choking on Unlimited

Our Fastest Mobile Networks results this yr showed Verizon to have the fastest nationwide network, but Ookla's scores show T-Mobile to exist the fastest, something T-Mobile hasn't hesistated to plaster all over the place. This study finally explains why.

Our bulldoze tests used Samsung Galaxy S8 phones with special SIM cards that never got throttled. So our study shows what the mobile networks are capable of, with the latest telephone technology.

Ookla's crowd-sourced numbers show the speeds that existent users are getting, on their ain retail service plans. Then if a lot of those users are beingness throttled, it'll choke downward apparent speeds.

In Ookla'south tests, the number of results with speeds nether 5Mbps shot up after Verizon and AT&T started selling unlimited data plans, even while the networks, as a whole, got faster. Function of the issue may exist AT&T's new budget "unlimited selection" plan, which throttles all of its customers to 3Mbps. But Verizon doesn't have such a plan.

Verizon decline in speeds

"Whether these carriers are deprioritizing customers or customers are flocking to slower, more budget-friendly plans, both AT&T and Verizon are seeing an increase of customers experiencing speeds less than 5Mbps," the written report says.

Our drive tests back up this conclusion. If Verizon's network was actually nether strain, we'd have seen our unthrottled speeds get slower, every bit we did when the iPhone offset smashed through AT&T's network. But Verizon's doing fine with throttling turned off.

This amount of throttling is really putting the lie to the give-and-take "unlimited," both on Verizon's and AT&T's plans. Ookla'southward data makes it wait like a significant number of Verizon and AT&T users—nosotros don't know how many, really—are hitting a wall, hard, where their LTE gets slowed to a trickle.

"Verizon Wireless has the fastest service in many of the cities we looked at and comes in 2nd on acceptable speeds, merely we suspect their utilise of deprioritization on Unlimited could be bringing down their overall functioning," the report says.