AT&T has a much lower rate of LTE access and a higher rate of 'No coverage.' Verizon users have access to LTE 95.9 percent of the time and are only without service 3.3 percent of the time. This metric is referred to as 'LTE Accessibility' in the first graph. I bring this up, not to dump on Ookla's efforts, but to illustrate that reports like this really only have validity if you live in the areas they describe. If you happen to live in areas where AT&T hasn't yet deployed LTE, for example, improved results like the ones Ookla is trumpeting mean nothing to your quality of service. It's also 1/5 and roughly 1/3 of median US wireless performance.īoth the degree of improvement you see year-on-year (if any) and when those improvements arrive are both tied to how urban your home is. According to, as of, my iPhone SE is capable of 6.7Mbps down, 3.31Mbps up on AT&T's LTE network. I make this distinction - Ookla doesn't - because, if you live in a rural area in the United States, the rate at which your performance improves may depend on when the ancient equipment in the local cell tower needs to be replaced and not much more. Performance across the entire United States increased by 24 percent in download and 13 percent in upload, provided you live in a major metropolitan area and could benefit from these improvements in the first place. (Note: As a matter of full disclosure, both Ookla and PCMag are owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns ExtremeTech.) This type of testing is distinct from the driving tests that our sister publication PCMag also performs (Opens in a new window), but their results largely echo what Ookla is reporting. Ookla bases its speedtest information and comparisons by gathering data from 2.7M unique mobile user devices used to perform over 11.5M total benchmarks. In uploads we fared much worse, coming in at 94th (between Angola and Poland). In Q1 2019, the United States ranked 40th in the world for mean wireless download speeds (between Spain and Saudi Arabia). New speed test data from Ookla shows that both Verizon and AT&T have boosted mobile network performance in the past 12 months, though our absolute world ranking compared with other nations remains mired in the middle of the pack.

Check my speed ookla