T-Mobile Offers Fastest US LTE, But US Speeds Lag Globe

Russia is faster... the good news is Mexico is below us.

And Canada is above us - this also works geographically as well :P

I can tell you that this list is completely inaccurate. LTE in the US isn't that slow. The US avg. LTE download is about 13.6 Mbps not the 7 this list says. Canada averages about 17 Mbps. I will have a full list at the end of this month when my report comes out »speedsmart.net/reports

T-mobile has built out Wideband LTE in NYC. On a recent trip to NYC, I ran several speed test and I got up to 75 megabits down and 69 megabits up.

When I had Verizon, they were not close to those speeds.

Notably on the upload too. I've seen Verizon hit 75Mbps download during the very early morning hours. However, the upload never goes beyond 16Mbps. It might be something to do with how Verizon has configured their network (MIMO, backbone, spectrum, etc).

Vz/At&t uses 2x2 MIMO while T-mobile uses 4x2 MIMO, a significant advantage..

yea, but AT&T has already or about to roll out bands 29 and 30 for downlink augmentations, so that's short lived.

Those extra bands(29,30) can only be used with brand new phones which are likely to get to market a year or two from now.

The same goes for Vz/At&t current LTE customers, the most they support MIMO 2x2 or less(lots of older LTE tech to retire).

Meanwhile T-mobile has a modern baseline of new LTE phones. (Wayy more efficient, faster data rates.)

Our speeds suck because our carriers are insanely greedy and deploy the absolute minimum number of towers. Their profit ,Arvin's are the highest in the world, while equivalent cities throughout the the fastest countries have 4x the tower density.

Thats crap. If you put together all of those countries (sans Canada/Brazil) they wouldn't equate the size of the US. Canada is somewhat different because a vast majority of their population lives in 5 metro areas. Their population density is 1/10 the US, so tower density needs are 1/10. Go see how cheap wireless is in Canada... Once you get out of them connectivity can be quite spotty.

And I can tell you that in urban areas speed is NOT a problem for any carrier except maybe Sprint.

And I don't care, now I can travel to Europe and not pay 6 bucks for a Coke

As the US consolidates further the speeds go up. Also I see Cricket in there which is really AT&T and CAPPED for speed on purpose as is a lot of MVNO.

Again these graphs make the Euros feel good, and their wireless IS faster and cheaper but I would still rather live here.

Well you forgot Russia and Australia, but otherwise I generally agree. So there's a total of 4 countries ahead of us on that chart that we should actually feel bad about.

It'd be interesting to see metrics broken up accounting for population density. Until LTE and fiber deployment is universal, countries with more rural areas are always going to be behind. Even when that happens, there will likely be great new network technologies and we'll be rinsing and repeating, there certainly will be for wireless.

Well, you forgot indeed Canada, Australia, Brazil and Russia but that's not the point.
I do not think that these statistics matter that much. My T mobile broadband speed is awesome and the price is not higher than in many of those countries on the list. Although the taxes are, at least here in FL, higher than in most places around the globe.
The true problem in the U.S. is the wired broadband, with it's insane pricing and minimal availability.

Reminds me of my time in Ireland circa 2008 using Clearwire's WiMax "Broadband in a Box". Speeds we're great, even while traveling and roaming from tower to tower.

Fast forward to early 2010, Clearwire releases WiMax here in the states and I sign up thinking the previous positive experience (2+ years prior) in Ireland would only be better. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Not sure if it's tower density, the US is simply a difficult place to do business compared with the rest of the world, or something else, but US broadband/wireless companies always seem to take the shortcut rather than get it right.

Oh bull. Just use Google and you see story after story of some town denying a tower permit because they "look ugly" and will "decrease property values". The same idiots also then complain about why their connections are so bad. In a lot of these other countries carriers don't have to deal with these BS rules. They need a tower somewhere it goes up.

Actually it's usually more heavily regulated.

T mobile screams wherever i go. Typically 40/24mbps. This is in eugene or, springfield or, and modesto ca where i have tested it.

Sprint just deployed spark here and they got LTE.. spark performs as slow as 8mbps down but averages 16mbps down. At night spark does 30mbps down. Uploads always suck at 6mbps or lower. Regular LTE does between 8-16mbps.

I prefer t mobile for sure. I can upload youtube video in minutes flat and not dink around using my battery to transmit as on sprint where it takes an hour or more to upload a huge video, chugs away at battery life for sure..

Dont know how t mobile did it but they have superior network deployment practices essentially makes cell sites denser, signal and throughput higher.

Come to my area you'll get nothing, Not even 2G. Hence T-Mobile's problem

It's tmobile's fault you live in BFE?

Try using T-Mobile or Sprint in Montana.. that's if you can find a tower.

You are out in the middle of nowhere where none of the population really exists. I understand it sucks out there .. But sticking to any huge city in majorily populated areas gets you good coverage and a superior connection city wide.

Then maybe people should stop visiting here (and other states) and complaining about no coverage then?

Here is the population list for our "our in the middle of nowhere" state:

Billings: ~110k
Bozeman: ~40k
Helena: ~30k
Missoula: ~70k
Butte: ~34K

So, if they'd just stick a tower here in Billings, or add one in the college/university cities (Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, Helena, etc), no problem. But they chose not to cover ANYTHING out here, which is their own damn fault. Only thing they do have is service partners in small pockets

Yet, they'll cover other "middle of nowhere" cities and towns. Take Cheyenne, Wyoming for example. ~65,000 people and they have excellent coverage.

No, this is not about population. I am curious on what it really is, though.

You seem really angry over having to pay high prices to Verizon and ATT. Sorry but that is the price you pay for living in low a population density area.

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li ··· _density

I've been on ST for over 2 years now on their BYOP SIM card. No issues at all, and I pay just $45/mo. The coverage is awesome as well.

As for our internet, it's not bad. We get a 60x4 from Charter. We also have a Level(3) building here as well as a major fiber POP.

As for "BFE", Wyoming has partner support and they're more "BFE" than us.

If I had to guess, there's a monopoly or a duopoly on backhaul in your areas where it's simply not affordable for anyone else.

Pay the stupid tax for living in Montana. You don't get city services living in the middle of nowhere. Let me guess, your internet service is crappy and slow too?

I have traveled w/ T-Mobile. it works in all major towns. out of town areas it's 2G or sometimes LTE/3G in Oregon and California.

you get used to it being w/o data on the highways and certain smaller cities only really having service in big towns where it works great. even with 2G it doesn't usually work (high packet loss occurs).

the fast in town performance trumps having coverage in areas less traveled.

in a highly populated area? it's solid coverage in town. traveling from Oregon to California I had coverage in more areas in California than Oregon, which was limited to the big cities only (for LTE, voice works along the major highways in Oregon).

on freeways in California I had LTE most of the time when I expected to have nothing.

I was very satisfied w/ service. That's because 40/24 is hard to beat, that's the typical speed you will see MOST OF THE TIME AS LONG AS YOU HAVE A GOOD SIGNAL AND NOT FRINGE OR OUT OF TOWN.. MOST OF THE TIME IS PRETTY DAMN GOOD. I RARELY SEE BELOW 40/24, IT'S ALMOST NEVER BELOW 30/16 FOR ME, EVER AROUND OREGON AND CALIFORNIA. I have actually never seen a fringe signal and never seen the type of poor LTE performance like these numbers "9Mbps average" or whatever..

I have been on the fringe inside a library before, the signal is likely to drop - but if it doesn't, I'm pulling an insane data rate faster than most home connections. 40/24 style.

I DON'T GET WHY SPRINT ISN'T LIKE THIS, IT SUCKS UNLESS YOU GOT SPARK 60mbps service otherwise it just BLOWS.. I HEAR THO THAT THE 60MBPS NUMBERS ARE RARE AND ONLY IN GOOD SIGNAL AREAS SO LIKE THAT'S WHY IT MUST SUCK SO MUCH BALLS WHEN I USE IT..

lol calm down dude.

My personal experience is TMO is considerably faster than ATT. The company iPhone is on ATT and my personal phone was on Straight Talk ATT. The best speed test for either phone would be close to 20Mbps down and 5-10 up. Many times both up and down were below 10Mbps. I switched my personal phone to TMO and if the signal has at least two bars (usually), its 30 down and 10-15up. If I have an all-bar signal, it's at least 40down and 15up. Many times it hits 50 and sometimes 60down.

ATT and TMO sure do have fast speeds and in the case of VZ and ATT pretty much country wide.

Almost none of those countries have any sizable deployment. Korea does and a few others that is true.

The speeds in Europe rarely come to hit anywhere what US speeds typically are. Russia should not be on the list. The LTE network is confined to like 12 towers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. I travel enough to know I think.

Some of those countries barely even have LTE, or have it in the center of the capital.

This report is a joke.

The size of the USA coupled with the fact that ATT and Verizon have LTE pretty much everywhere they have service outpaces EE in UK, and certainly Orange. I never used DT or Vodaphone so I cant attest.

I can here it already....

"Boohoo, we can't have these speeds because our country is so big and it is much too costly".

Hint: Canada and Australia have 10% of the inhabitants and the same amount of land space. Yet they can enjoy higher speeds driving coast to coast..... Funny how that works.

I think the real reason is, in America we have extreme republican backed capitolism where they find it is not about tech and performance or investment in awesome infastructure but profits only so it is more profitable to build a crappy LTE network and push cost savings to the max rather than deploy the technology properly.

They save cash by deploying less coverage and less denser cell sites pushing you onto the fringe the majority of the time keeping data rates low.

Another thing is there is a lack of coop between companies to combine their spectrum into one network rather than four major ones and many separate ones (if the spectrum was combined you would have one super fast lte network).

Its possible these other countries have given their ISPs significantly more spectrum as well otherwise they might have the same amount but deploy much denser networks.

Possible that our copper line networks are also limiting lte performance.. cause in america rather than have fiber we have crappy copper lines and poorer network performance on average..

Most of Canada and Australia's populations live in the cities.

I couldn't tell you the last time I got anything less than ~30mbit/sec on AT&T or Verizon LTE. T-Mobile was around 10 when I could actually sustain LTE coverage. Where are they running these tests, Cousinfuck, Arkansas?

Seeing you're in Chicago, I could imagine the speed and coverage of LTE is superb. Go out to the suburbs or even the exurbs, and I'd be interested to see how long you can obtain 30 mbps. Matter of fact, see how long you can obtain 30 mbps on the 3G/EVDO spectrum in a more rural area. Even on AT&T or Verizon's network. Again, what you see there is the *average* speed of U.S. LTE service.

I'm out in the suburbs/exurbs of Chicago quite a bit; VZ/AT&T are just as great out there, while I'm lucky if I can even get HSPA on T-Mobile.

Now that's hilarious. The country made famous for coffee and cocaine is now known for faster LTE than America.

As such why are they so much slower than the official AT&T?

Prepaid networks generally have much lower data priority than postpaid customers on a network. Combine that with the fact that (iirc) Cricket is ratelimiting customers, and tunnelling them through a proxy on one of the coasts.

After reading the comments about slow LTE and such, I have to ask, what phone or app other than speedtest or tethering requires such large amounts of bandwidth?

Using your smartphone LTE as a WISP is the only reason I can come up with.

For me I'd rather have lower priced service limited to 4-5mbps w/ 40-50ms latency than higher priced service with more, albeit unused, bandwidth.

YouTube, vimeo, OneDrive, Google Drive, FTP, any type of media watching like video download etc. Reason: spend less time transmitting and waiting, save battery life. Using less power you can xfer significantly larger amounts of data with Tmo.

I am talking about like YouTube video uploads, vimeo uploads, large file transfers, etc. Tmo is well equipped for large data transfers handling them in seconds ot minutes flat taking hours of time on all other data providers for LTE..

Anyway screw that idea of slow capped service. Tmo don't play that game.

Smartphone streaming video needs how much bandwidth? 3mbps?

I guess you could use a smartphone for file transfers via g-drive, ftp, BitTorrent, dropbox etc but I tether for stuff like that or wait till I arrive at home or the office and use a workstation.

I care about personal cost and don't pay for bandwidth I don't use. I can plug my phone in if I have to wait for a YouTube video to upload. It's not something I do often enough anyways to justify paying for more bandwidth.

For business, it becomes a business expense and we would not be having this conversation.

And I use my home theater, or laptop for multimedia not my phone... ymmv

Speed for the most part sound to be great, but they really need to expand the coverage to make it effective.... I'd highly consider T mobile if they just covered a couple more counties (mine being one of them) in their plans... I want them to do well, but I can subscribe to a service that I can't use :-/

For example, I just 'speed checked' my AT&T LTE connection here in Las Vegas @ 22 Mps down, 12 Mps up. I've rarely seen under 12 Mps down as I travel around the Southwest USA. (It's just killing me to say good stuff about one of the huge ISP's.)

What's up? They checking speeds in the middle of Kansas cornfields?

Again, Las Vegas is a larger metropolitan area. Speeds are faster in the larger metros than they are rural communities. There are still many parts of this country that doesn't even have 3.5 HSDPA+ available but rather just plain 3G or EV-DO.

From the worst coverage nationwide to abysmal speeds in downtown Phoenix, T-Mobile is just the worst. There are many times in town where all I get is Edge. That is embarrassing.

I was just in Phoenix last week. Stayed in sun city most of the time but went to ASU, some spring training games, cave Creek, the Phoenix zoo etc and always had great coverage on tmobile. My work phone is Verizon and that was significantly worse. There were places in the mountains where Verizon had 1x or no service and T-Mobile had LTE.

At home in Minneapolis I get excellent speeds as well, upwards of 90 Mbps on occasion and easily 50-60mbps.

I'm seeing 60-100Mbps+ in my local area. Notice how at&t and vzw ads avoid talking about speeds, in the case of at&t they only say "strongest LTE signal" but nothing about their lagging speeds or their bandwidth caps.

Nokia is deploying most of the new TMO infrastructure. Ericsson is running builds in quite a few markets where they are forced to install Nokia equipment at the cell sites.

Working at a few mbps almost everywhere on AT&T or Verizon is much more useful than 50mbps in downtown, spotty in the 'burbs and EDGE or nothing in much of the country.