Telecom & Wireless

T-Mobile Finishes Last in Evaluation of US Wireless Carriers

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: August 23, 2016 10:10 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:21 am

In a new Rootmetrics study, T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) finished fourth in the national “overall” measure, which includes “reliability,” “speed,” “text,” “data” and “call.” Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) proved once again that it has a quality edge in the United States over the other big four carriers, beating out AT&T Inc. (NYSE; T) and Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) as well as T-Mobile.

The measures were from the study for the first half of 2016. Rootmetrics experts wrote:

T-Mobile’s relative national rankings in our testing across the United States were identical to what we found in both the first and second halves of 2015. We’ve noted before that T-Mobile typically performs much better in metro areas compared to state or national levels, and that was again the case in the first half of 2016. While T-Mobile didn’t win any United States RootScore Awards in this test period, the network narrowly trailed AT&T for third place in both our Data RootScore category and our Network Speed RootScore category.

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.