We hit 30 U.S. cities to test mobile data speeds on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, and found the most competitive wireless landscape in six years. Find out which network is the best where you live.

For the second year in a row, Verizon Wireless takes the crown as America’s fastest mobile network by delivering the quickest speeds and the best coverage across the map. The nation’s largest carrier has maintained the quality of its XLTE network in the face of stronger competition than ever.

To some extent, everyone’s a winner, because heightened competition is the big story of our sixth annual Fastest Mobile Networks testing. For the past six years, Verizon and AT&T have traded off winning the national title, largely because of far superior high-speed coverage when compared with Sprint and T-Mobile. But T-Mobile emerged as a force to be reckoned with last year, and now, for the first time, Sprint is competitive. The results show that the big four carriers didn’t need to merge to succeed. They’re doing just fine.

Focusing on coverage, we ran more test cycles than ever before: 131,000 cycles over 30 cities and thousands of miles of driving. Our new transportation partner, Chevrolet, lent us three vehicles equipped with AT&T OnStar 4G LTE so we could see if the big roof-mounted antenna improved coverage. See OnStar Tested to find out.
We found a more competitive landscape than ever. Verizon won about half the cities and all the rural regions, like last year. But the rest of the cities were almost equally split between AT&T, with strongholds in the Southeast and Texas, and T-Mobile, which was especially strong in Western cities.

Sprint only won one city, Denver, but I don’t want to minimize its achievements. If we handed out a “most improved” award—we don’t—Sprint would win it by a landslide. The carrier flipped over from an old WiMAX network to a spotty LTE network in 2013, filling in coverage gaps in 2014 but offering very low speeds. This year, the carrier’s Network Vision and Spark initiatives finally took hold, and Sprint’s speeds doubled or even tripled in most of our test cities.
Looking at our nationwide drive maps, we’re also seeing 3G and LTE coverage expansions for every carrier except Verizon, which already had nearly perfect coverage in 2014. Both AT&T and T-Mobile have filled in their LTE gaps along I-95 in the Northeast and I-55 in Mississippi, for instance. T-Mobile’s improvements were especially dramatic; the carrier used to only have LTE in little 30-mile bubbles around cities, but now it stretches far down the interstates. Sprint is still spotty, but considerably less than it used to be, with much broader coverage in the suburbs of Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, and Houston, for example.

Where We Tested
We perform our tests on the road because drive testing compares networks at the same time, in the same place, with similar devices. It also lets us find out where networks don’t work well, as we can watch when our drive tests fail—something that crowdsourced numbers generally don’t report. In a country where LTE coverage is still sometimes spotty, the information on when networks are failing is very important.
For the first time, we saw LTE on all four wireless carriers in all 30 of our test cities. We’ve been keeping the same list of cities for the past several years so we can watch the networks change; this year, we went to San Antonio and Tampa rather than Austin and Jacksonville (San Antonio and Tampa have more people) but left the other 28 cities the same, with five cities in each of the six regions of the country.
Outside of the 30 cities, our drivers traveled on a mix of interstate and U.S. highways, and stopped in smaller cities along the way such as Columbia, MO; Tallahassee, FL; and Arcata, CA. The data collected contributed to a “suburban/rural” score for each of our six regions.

What We Tested
This is Fastest Mobile Networks, so we’re focusing on data speed and reliability. We didn’t test call quality, dropped calls, or coverage. For the best assessment of voice call quality according to our readers, check out our annual Readers’ Choice awards results. To get a picture of wireless coverage near you, go to Sensorly’s website and you’ll see crowdsourced coverage maps for all the major U.S. mobile carriers, enhanced with the data from our test drives.
Mobile networks are constantly changing, and almost always for the better. And because speeds vary based on tower location, network load, device used, and even the weather, we can’t predict performance in a specific location; rather, we’re giving a snapshot of a few days’ worth of usage in several locations across a metro area. Hit the next page for our regional and national winners.