Fastest Mobile Networks 2018

In this, our last Fastest Mobile Networks survey of the 4G era, Verizon once again cements its position as the 4G leader. The nation’s largest carrier also runs the nation’s fastest LTE data network, with the fastest download speeds and lowest latency.

- Sascha Segan

We’ve been drive-testing American mobile networks since 2010, first 3G and then 4G, watching speeds grow and coverage expand. Yes, dead zones still exist—American cities have less reliable mobile coverage than Canadian cities, we’ve found. But we’ve seen steady improvement over the years, especially from T-Mobile, and Americans in major metropolitan areas can now generally assume a level of service they couldn’t a few years ago.

Compared with 2017, we’re seeing faster, more consistent LTE connections on all four major US wireless networks. Peak speeds have jumped from the 200Mbps range to the 300Mbps range, average download speeds have bumped up by 10Mbps or more, and latency has dropped by 10ms. That’s an impressive change in one year, and it continues the trend of improvement that we’ve seen over the past several years of testing. You can read about how speeds have changed over the past few years in our “Regional and National Winners” section of this story.

Much more than in previous years, we saw many cities where the carrier with the fastest average download speeds didn’t win the award. We’re okay with that. Our speed score tries to balance all of the components of a mobile connection: downloads, uploads, availability, and latency. (For more details, check our “Testing Methodology” section.) As we get to a world where we can assume 20Mbps or higher download speeds on 4G in most cities, other questions arise: Where are those speeds most consistent? Where is the network most responsive, especially when you’re downloading pages made up of many small files?