Ookla Speedtest has just named T-Mobile the best mobile network in America, in what it claims is one of the biggest network tests of its kind. Is this true and what does it mean?
One thing that seems certain is that T-Mobile likes the prefix ‘un”. “An underdog story 12 years in the making, the Un-carrier becomes the undisputed industry leader,” it said in its new press release.
“Backed by half a billion real world tests on millions of devices, the results reflect how people actually use their phones for things like video streaming, web browsing and more. By measuring both speed and experience, Ookla confirmed T-Mobile’s position at the top, surpassing both AT&T and Verizon,” T-Mobile claimed.
Ookla is a respected brand, and specifically referred to six months of analysis “that included more than 570 million test points and 6 million different devices,” T-Mobile’s president of technology, Ulf Ewaldsson told Fierce Network.
In recent years, Verizon has held this title, and it’s a pretty simple one, best network, rather than most widely available or fastest downloads or whatever. As such, it’s worth taking notice of.
Such an honor comes at a good time for the brand, which also announced a commercial launch date for its satellite connectivity service, T-Satellite which works on iPhone and Android handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S25. This service runs in conjunction with Starlink (though it doesn’t install Starlink on your phone). This will go live on July 23 nationwide, “extending coverage into more than 500,000 square miles of U.S. territory that traditional cell towers can’t reach,” T-Mobile said.
It said that the beta program has been trialed by almost 1.8 million users, with tens of thousands of those taking part being customers of Verizon and AT&T.
The company’s rise to success is partly thanks to the way it has combined its low-band spectrum with the mid-band range from Sprint. Some networks focused on the mmWave spectrum, which offers outstanding speeds but has problems beating some obstacles. Ewaldsson told Cnet that the company went in a different direction. “We said, ‘it’s going to be a mid-band play, and it’s going to be TDD [Time Division Duplex, a way to send and receive data in the same frequency]
spectrum in the mid-band that you pair with a very strong low band.’ We were able to get our hands on the best possible spectrum, thanks to merging with Sprint,” Ewaldsson said.
The company also introduced new perks for its customers, such as DashPass, which offers DoorDash with no delivery fees and reduced service fees.
