Sprint receives its first-ever national award in RootMetrics testing
Sprint captured its first-ever national award in RootMetrics’ latest round of network testing, although Verizon continues to dominate RootMetrics’ assessments across the board.
At the state level, Verizon won 268 awards out of 300– down 10 since the second half of last year. AT&T, meanwhile, earned 140 awards as compared to the 92 that it won in the previous round of testing. Sprint won 31 awards, down three. T-Mobile US jumped from 13 state-level awards in the second half of 2016 to 21 awards this time around.
“Verizon obviously remains the outstanding performer at the national level, and also at the state level and the metro level,” said Annette Hamilton, director of communications for RootMetrics.
Verizon was far and away the dominant winner at the national level, with five outright wins. AT&T had strong second-place showings. Three carriers now share the award for text performance: Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, with its first national award showing. At the metro level, however, there is more jockeying: Verizon and Sprint won fewer awards than in the previous round of testing, which AT&T jumped from 372 metro-level awards to 396 as it significantly boosted speeds; and T-Mobile US won just one more award than in the second half of 2016.
“You have to keep in mind that all the awards are relative to the other carriers,” Hamilton pointed out. “So it may not be that Sprint is getting worse at the state level — they aren’t — but other carriers are improving faster.”
RootMetrics noted that AT&T, T-Mobile US and Sprint have all seen significant increases in reliability and speed results at the metro level.
Hamilton said that in terms of LTE network expansion, “AT&T and Sprint and T-Mobile are all increasing their LTE and improving their LTE footprint. Verizon has been so solid in LTE footprint for so long that you’re not going to see as much of an improvement from them.”
In a blog entry, Sprint CTO Dr. John Saw said that Sprint was “excited to see that the Sprint LTE Plus network shows year-over-year improvement” and said that the carrier’s customers sent 177 billion text messages in the first half of 2017. RootMetrics did note that for Sprint in particular, its “expanded LTE footprint resulted in significantly boosted data speeds [and] reliability at the metro level.”
While T-Mobile US didn’t win any national-level awards, Hamilton noted, the company seems to be focused on improving its network at the metropolitan market level — and it’s doing that. RootMetrics commented that as the T–Mobile US has boosted its network speeds in metro markets — 76 markets had T-Mobile US speeds greater than 20 Mbps, compared to 52 in the last round of testing — that its “gains in the network speed category helped the carrier cut into Verizon’s lead.”
“T-Mobile is making gains in particular metro markets, and that seems to be their strategy — where Verizon is looking at covering the entire country,” Hamilton said.
RootMetrics based its rankings on about 4.7 million tests conducted over 275,000 miles of drive testing and more than 8,800 indoor locations. Hamilton said that RootMetrics has doubled the amount of indoor locations that it tested in this round, in order to better reflect the fact that so much mobile network usage comes from the indoor environment.
RootMetrics tested with the Galaxy S7 across all carriers in the first half, Hamilton said, so the company was able to see some influence from advanced LTE features that the carriers are implementing such as more extensive carrier aggregation.
