T-Mobile extended its lead in the 5G availability and download speed departments in Opensignal’s latest quarterly report. Verizon won accolades for 5G video and gaming.
Once again, T-Mobile took the award for 5G download speed – for the fourth time in a row – increasing its lead on Verizon and AT&T and becoming the first to average over the 100 Mbps speed mark (118.7 Mbps), according to Opensignal.
T-Mobile’s average 5G download speed increased by 35.6% in the last three months. In addition, T-Mobile customers experienced the best 5G availability, meaning they spend more time connected to 5G, and benefit by the largest 5G reach, so they get a 5G signal in more places across the country, according to the report.
“Our T-Mobile users spent over one third of their time – 34.7% – with an active 5G connection compared with 16.4% for AT&T users and 9.7% on Verizon. Similarly, T-Mobile wins 5G Reach with a score of 7.2 on a 10 point scale, over two points ahead of its nearest rival,” Opensignal wrote in its October report. “5G Reach represents the proportion of locations a 5G user visits that have a 5G signal.”
Opensignal defines “5G availability” as a reflection of the proportion of time Opensignal users with a 5G device have a 5G connection. It’s not designed as a measure of coverage or the geographic extent of a network, though to be sure, T-Mobile boasts the greatest 5G coverage compared with its U.S. rivals.
Interestingly, Opensignal’s report references seasonality when it comes to 5G availability. Users on all three U.S. carriers experienced declines to their 5G availability compared with its previous report. A lot of folks are outside during the warmer summer months, so seasonality plays a role here.
Still, while T-Mobile and Verizon saw relatively limited declines, AT&T’s score decreased by a greater amount (6.1 percentage points), indicating that seasonality alone didn’t explain the change in AT&T’s score. “It is possible that AT&T may have made some network configuration changes or had other problems with their 5G network that had an impact on its users’ 5G Availability,” according to Opensignal.
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One of T-Mobile’s big advantages is mostly due to Sprint – that is, the 2.5 GHz spectrum that Sprint brought with its 2020 merger with T-Mobile. Opensignal gives T-Mobile props for deploying that mid-band spectrum for 5G at break-neck speeds.
Indeed, T-Mobile boasts the country’s largest, most reliable 5G network and T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray insists it will “continue to pull even farther away from the pack on performance.”
However, Verizon and AT&T are on the verge of taking possession of the first tranche of C-band (3.7-3.98 GHz) spectrum for which they paid dearly. That spectrum starts to get released in December 2021; more of that becomes available later as satellite companies move out of the spectrum and up the band.
In the lead – for how long?
So, how long is T-Mobile’s lead in mid-band 5G going to last? Considering that many consumers hang onto their handsets longer than they used to, does a head start of 18 months to two years even matter? That is, if consumers don’t replace their LTE handset with a 5G version for a couple or more years, they aren’t exactly adding to the 5G coffers.
Clearly, both AT&T and Verizon will soon be able to deploy quantities of new mid-band 5G spectrum in the C-band that is similar to the 2.5 GHz spectrum that T-Mobile has been using as part of its 5G offering, noted Opensignal VP of Analysis Ian Fogg.
“5G is still at an early stage of development and the use of new C-band spectrum will change the competitive position in the U.S. between the carriers as AT&T and Verizon are able to increase the amount of spectrum capacity available to support their 5G users,” Fogg told Fierce.
“However, T-Mobile is also in the process of expanding its 5G service — its initial 5G services only used a part of the spectrum they have available for 5G and there is headroom for T-Mobile to boost its users 5G experience too,” he added. “The next twelve months will be extremely interesting as 5G competition accelerates.”