Verizon, At&t May Be Choking Unlimited Data Users

4G LTE speeds in the U.S. are getting faster, but our wireless networks may be choking down unlimited data users, according to a new report from Ookla Speedtest. That makes T-Mobile the fastest mobile carrier in the U.S., according to crowd sourced speed tests.

- Sascha Segan

It isn’t that simple, though. The report notes that T-Mobile is still at the bottom for overall population coverage. Verizon has great coverage and speeds, but is throttling heavy data users. And AT&T and Sprint provide high speeds less consistently than the other two carriers, the report says.

Ookla’s new speed score isn’t a sheer measure of megabits downloaded. It incorporates low-end, median and top-end performance for both download and upload speed, to give a bigger picture of overall speed. That’s a similar approach to the one we take in our own Fastest Mobile Networks study.

SPEED VS. COVERAGE

Ookla (which is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company) didn’t look at speed only. By seeing where users were taking tests, Ookla calculated that AT&T and Verizon still have better coverage than Sprint and T-Mobile. While the two bigger carriers cover 98 to 99 percent of the population, the smaller ones are 93 to 94 percent. That difference adds up to about 20 million people.