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Verizon Wins Award as Top US Wireless Carrier

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: August 23, 2016 9:10 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:21 am

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) proved once again that it has a quality edge in the United States over the other big four carriers. In a new Rootmetrics study, it crushed AT&T Inc. (NYSE; T), T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) and Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) in the “overall” measure nationwide, which includes “reliability,” “speed,” “text,” “data” and “call.” The measures were from the study for the first half of 2016.

Rootmetrics researchers wrote:

Verizon’s performance in our testing of the United States was outstanding. For the first time since we began testing the whole of the US in the second half of 2013, Verizon won United States RootScore Awards outright across all six RootScore categories: Overall performance, Network Reliability, Network Speed, Data performance, Call performance, and Text performance. Perhaps just as impressive is that Verizon won the United States Overall RootScore Award for the sixth consecutive time.

Verizon’s score was 93.9, AT&T’s 89.9, Sprint’s 85.5 and T-Mobile’s 82.5.

Methodology:

To determine which network led the performance race in the first half of 2016, we drove over 265,000 miles while testing performance on highways and in big cities, small towns, and rural areas across the US. To put that in perspective, consider that the distance from New York City to Los Angeles is approximately 2,800 miles, the circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles, and the moon is about 239,000 miles away. While collecting samples for our national report, our professional testers could have driven from NYC to LA about 95 times, circled the earth over 10 times, or made it all the way to the moon (and then some). All told, we collected approximately 3.7 million test samples while driving and at more than 4,200 indoor locations.