BEST MOBILE NETWORKS 2022

We drove across the US testing speed and reliability for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon 4G and 5G in cities, towns, and rural regions before crowning our 13th annual champion.

- SASCHA SEGAN

T-Mobile isn't just America's fastest network. It's also the best.

For this year's nationwide network tests, we changed everything. We drove more than 10,000 miles across the country with new software that tracks dropped calls and gives a better measure of reliability. That made this year's project a search for America's best mobile network-not just the fastest, as we've called it in previous years.

This time, we hit 31 cities and six rural regions using the latest Samsung Galaxy S22+ phones to see how AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon compared. T-Mobile won 18 of our 31 cities to Verizon's seven and AT&T's six.

Look purely at speed, and the difference is even more stark. AT&T's entire advantage was in places where it has greater network reliability than T-Mobile. T-Mobile won 20 cities on speed, to Verizon's nine and AT&T's two.

T-Mobile is also doing better than ever before in rural areas, although it got docked a little for still having more rural data dead zones outside the Northeast than the other two carriers did.

WHY RATE MOBILE NETWORKS?

Mobile internet is the internet, more than ever. According to Ericsson, between 2018 and 2022, mobile data traffic in North America quadrupled-from 22 exabytes to 86 exabytes. Most of that is driven by the revolution in mobile video, which has risen from 60% to 70% of mobile data traffic. That's almost 20 gigs of usage per person per month.

And over the past year, a new use case has shown up: Both T-Mobile and Verizon are now selling 5G home internet service as an alternative to cable. It's always good to ask your friends and neighbors how well the service works or to get a "test drive" unit. But some good third-party scores can really help you decide whether that's a product worth considering.