T-Mobile had the fastest median mobile download speed and Verizon Wireless was tops in the fixed broadband category in Ookla’s first quarter Speedtest assessment of wireless speeds in the United States.
T-Mobile’s median download speed was 117.83 Mbps. Verizon Wireless passed AT&T for second place at 62.62 Mbps. AT&T finished at 56.10 Mbps.
Verizon and T-Mobile were tied in the latency category at 31 milliseconds in the Speedtest. AT&T finished third at 34 ms.
Consistency is a measure of the portion of time that a carrier provides at least 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds. T-Mobile took the category with a consistency score of 88.3%. Verizon Wireless finished at 84.6% and AT&T at 82.1%.
T-Mobile took the top spot in the 5G-only category with a download speed of 191.12 Mbps. Verizon Wireless was second for the second consecutive quarter but noted a significant jump – from 78.52 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 107.25 Mbps in the most recent quarter. AT&T was third at 68.43 Mbps.
Ookla said that the jump that Verizon Wireless achieved resulted from the company turning on its C-band spectrum in January.
The 5G availability category measures the percentage of time that the carrier’s users spend on 5G, both on-network and roaming. T-Mobile was tops at 65.0%, followed by AT&T at 49.4% and Verizon Wireless at 28.2%.
T-Mobile was tops in the 5G consistency category at 79.9%, followed by Verizon Wireless at 79.0% and AT&T at 66.8%. Ookla points out that there was no statistical winner in this category.
The top five city speeds for 5G were St. Paul, MN (136.72 Mbps), Tampa, FL (123.70 Mbps), Chicago (114.24 Mbps), Baltimore (109.58 Mbps) and Minneapolis, MN (109.24 Mbps).
Fixed Broadband
The firm also measured fixed broadband. The key takeaways:
Verizon had the fastest downloads at 184.36 Mbps. It was followed by Comcast Xfinity (179.12 Mbps), Cox (174.32 Mbps), Charter Spectrum (166.46 Mbps), AT&T Internet (140.52 Mbps) and CenturyLink (40.58 Mbps).
The leader in the latency category was Verizon (8 ms). It was followed by Cox (11 ms), AT&T Internet and Comcast Xfinity (both at 14 ms), CenturyLink (15 ms) and Charter Spectrum (16.ms).
There was no consistency winner from the statistical viewpoint. Comcast Xfinity finished at 90.6% and Charter Spectrum at 90.3% in the category, which looked at the percentage that the carrier maintained speeds of 25 Mbps for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads. Those carriers were followed by Verizon (89.4%), Cox (84.2%), AT&T Internet (80.4%) and CenturyLink (57.4%).
Finally, the study looked at fixed broadband speeds for the top 100 most populous cities in the U.S. Jersey City, NJ was tops at 215.78 Mbps. The rest of the top five were Raleigh NC (213.84 Mbps) and three Texas cities: San Antonio (208.93 Mbps), Austin (207.62 Mbps) and Irving (206.95 Mbps)
