Re: Fastest Mobile Networks 2021

On 10/6/2021 2:32 PM, Alan Browne wrote:

<snip>

> How can it be a marketing stunt if it is comparing 3 companies?  It's 
> clear you're just venting at PC Mag.  But their tests were done in a 
> reasonable manner - controlled, data collected, reduced and presented.

Correct.

As long as people realize that they were _only_ conducting speed tests, 
and only in places where all three carriers had coverage, the results 
are fine.

The results also reflect what each carrier has been spending their Capex 
funds on.

Verizon has been spending heavily on mmWave 5G so it's not surprising 
that Verizon showed the highest maximum speed by around a 2 to 1 margin. 
Verizon really wants to compete against Comcast and AT&T in home 
broadband and acquiring the optimum sites for their 5G small cells, 
before other carriers grab them, is very important. They also are 
looking at the enterprise segment, which T-Mobile has never been 
interested in 
<https://www.fiercewireless.com/operators/head-start-5g-mec-gives-verizon-edge-enterprise>. 
Whether or not Verizon can actually make any money from their mmWave 5G 
investment is the real question.

T-Mobile has been adding low-band 5G to its existing 4G cells which 
increased their average speed far above AT&T or Verizon, but has lagged 
in mmWave deployment. T-Mobile had the poorest network availability and 
the most latency, also not surprising.

Personally I would have weighted "% Above 25Mbps" higher since that's 
the threshold below which users might begin to notice speed differences, 
at least if they were streaming high-resolution video at 120 fps.

As others have pointed out, these small speed differences, that users 
are unlikely to ever notice, are meaningless. In 2020, Verizon was the 
fastest <https://www.pcmag.com/news/fastest-mobile-networks-2020> and it 
was equally meangingless. 2020 was interesting because T-Mobile had more 
than 13x the 5G than Verizon yet had much lower average download speeds. 
5G capable phones now account for about 20% of phones in use, so LTE 
speeds, where Verizon excels, are still important.