Telecom & Wireless

AT&T Finishes Second in US Wireless Carrier Study

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: August 23, 2016 9:45 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:21 am

In a new Rootmetrics study, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) finished in the second spot behind Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), but ahead of T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) and Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), in the national “overall” measure, which includes “reliability,” “speed,” “text,” “data” and “call.” The measures were from the study for the first half of 2016.

Rootmetrics researchers wrote:

AT&T finished second to Verizon in five out of six categories at the national level, including the holistic areas of overall performance, network reliability, network speed, and data performance. The only area in which AT&T didn’t rank second behind Verizon was in the Call RootScore category; Sprint again narrowly edged past AT&T to finish second.

This marks the first time in five test periods that AT&T didn’t win or share the United States Text RootScore Award. In our previous test period, AT&T and Verizon shared top honors in the Text RootScore category. In this round of testing, however, AT&T finished second in the category, while Verizon won the Text RootScore Award outright.

In short, AT&T has remained a strong number-two performer behind Verizon in our United States RootScore testing for six consecutive test periods.

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.