Among the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., Chicago stood out as one of the highest-ranked cities in the country for mobile network quality, according to numbers from RootMetrics.
While overall network performance scores were generally pretty high in the largest U.S. cities, that didn’t necessarily translate to a RootMetrics top rank. For instance, Miami, Florida had a 95.8 (out of 100) score in overall performance, but it still only ranked 87th out of 125 metro areas in RootMetrics testing and hampered by a relatively lackluster performance in network speed.
The Windy City was the only city among the largest metropolitan areas to achieve a top-10 ranking in any category, and it did so in four of them: network reliability, network speed, data performance and overall performance.
“All four carriers delivered stellar speeds and excellent data reliability results in the dense urban core of the city, and call reliability was especially good in the market,” RootMetrics said. The aggregate median download speed in Chicago came in at 35.1 Mbps.
Among the other 10 largest metro markets:
-Atlanta, Georgia had the second-best RootMetrics ranking, coming in at #29. It had above-average performance in all six of RootMetrics’ performance categories and aggregate median download speed of 37.7 Mbps.
-Boston, Massachusetts clocked the fastest speeds among large metros, with an aggregate median download speed of 44.9 Mbps. RootMetrics said that the speeds of AT&T, T-Mobile US, and Verizon’s networks all had median download speeds of at least 46.1 Mbps, while Sprint came in at 30.2 Mbps.
-Washington, D.C. had “fast speeds and strong reliability” from all four national carriers, with an aggregate median download speed of 41.7 Mbps. RootMetrics noted that in D.C., “AT&T’s median download speed of 57.6 Mbps was especially fast and among the 15 fastest speeds we found in any market in 1H 2019.”
RootMetrics said that it considers data reliability rates (the ability to get connected and stay connected) of 97% or higher to be “excellent” and that blocked or dropped call rates of 2% or lower were also considered “excellent” performance. Additionally, the testing firm said that while a market may have a low ranking in a category, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that every carrier’s performance in that market was poor” — because it considers performance across all carriers in the market. So one carrier’s performance can still be strong, but if one or more others have weaker performance, that drags the overall performance ranking down.
Read more here from RootMetrics.
