T-Mobile Ranks Last Among Carriers for Mobile Performance

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 2:35PM EST · Published Feb 23, 6:20AM EST

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T-Mobile Ranks Last Among Carriers for Mobile Performance — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”507734″ placement=”ros”]T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) may be first among the four largest mobile carriers based on subscriber additions. However, in terms of network performance nationwide, it ranks last, which may be a hurdle to its future growth.

Based on new RootMetrics data for the second half of 2016, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) was the leader in the overall measure, which includes measures of reliability, speed, data, call and text. It received a score of 93.9. AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) followed with a score of 90.5. Sprint Corp.’s (NYSE: S) total score was 84.7. T-Mobile trailed at 81.2.

T-Mobile also finished in a tie for last with Sprint in state level testing. This was largely because of its poor performance outside of cities. In 125 metro areas measured, T-Mobile ranked third in the RootScore Awards tally. It fell behind AT&T and Verizon, but finished ahead of Sprint.

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Methodology:

To determine which network led the performance race in the second half of 2016, we drove nearly 250,000 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 90 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.

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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.