Verizon Ranked Best Among All US Carriers

(RTTNews) - Verizon remains the best mobile network carrier in the U.S. by delivering the best combination of fast speeds and excellent reliability among all carriers, a new report from IHS Markit's RootMetrics has found.

According to RootMetrics' semi-annual U.S. State of the Mobile Union report for the second half of 2019, Verizon continued to outperform the other carriers at the national, state and metro levels, while AT&T remained a strong number-two performer.

The biannual report was bought out after conducting nearly 3.8 million tests in the second half of 2019. The report shows how the carriers performed across the entire U.S., within each of the 50 states, and across the 125 most populated metropolitan markets in the country.

Verizon won or shared all six national awards in RootMetric's national testing and also delivered fast speeds. The carrier's aggregate median download speed of 32.7 megabits per second or Mbps was faster than those of Sprint and T-Mobile, and comparable to that of AT&T.

Verizon won the United States RootScore Awards outright in the categories of overall performance, network reliability, data performance, and call performance for the thirteenth straight time.

Meanwhile, AT&T was ranked second at the national level in five categories and tied for first with Verizon in the text category.

AT&T's national aggregate median download speed of 33.1 Mbps was much faster than Sprint's 23.1 Mbps and T-Mobile's 24.6 Mbps.

T-Mobile stood third among the carriers with the carrier continuing to typically perform much better in metropolitan markets than it does at state or national levels.

Sprint ranked fourth in five out of six categories at the national level. However, the report noted that the carrier's text results were generally strong and not far behind those of the leaders.

Carrier speeds in U.S. metros are faster than two years ago. The fastest median download speed recorded by RootMetrics during metro testing improved to 66.6 Mbps from 50.1 Mbps two years earlier.

RootMetrics noted that while 5G deployments have begun in major cities across the U.S., it would likely be well into 2020 or 2021 that 5G becomes a default mobile technology.

According to the report, early 5G speeds and availability in the U.S. were mixed, but improvements are expected later in 2020.

Meanwhile, carriers continued to deliver impressive speeds on 4G LTE, especially AT&T and Verizon.