Atlanta, Chicago Claim Top Spot in Wireless Survey

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 5, 6:49AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

In the new RootMetrics survey, which covers the first half of the year, for overall wireless service in the nation’s 125 most populous markets, Atlanta and Chicago easily finished at the top. On the other end of the spectrum, New York’s Hudson Valley and Reno were at the bottom of the list.

The research firm’s management says that the mobile networks performance tests cover speed, reliability, call quality, voice, texts and data.

At the top of the list, beyond Atlanta and Chicago, were Knoxville, Nashville and Jacksonville. At the bottom, rounding out the five are Omaha, Colorado Springs and El Paso.

RootMetrics also provided scores for the very largest metros:

New York City and the Tri-State Area easily has the most people of any metro area in America. But New York City mobile performance wasn’t anything to brag about. New York City and the Tri-State Area fell to the bottom half of our rankings in five of six categories, including an Overall Performance ranking of 74 (out of 125). Los Angeles has no room to brag, however. The nation’s second largest metro area finished below New York in almost every category, including ranking #89 for Overall Performance.

Rounding out the list of the largest metros, Miami finished in the 72nd spot, Philadelphia was 39th, Dallas 27th, Houston 22nd, Washington D.C. 67th and Boston 69th.

Faring less well among the largest metros:

The only large-sized city ranked near the bottom of our most recent metro area comparison was Denver. The nation’s 18^th-largest metro area, Denver finished as #122 for Network Speed and #121 for Data Performance in our mobile performance rankings.

While Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) and T-Mobile US Inc. (NYSE: TMUS) were not mentioned in the current survey, RootMetrics has a measure for these that will come out shortly.

ALSO READ: Customer Service Hall of Shame

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.