Boost's download speed was 30 percent slower in Seattle and 61 percent off Sprint's pace in Houston. While Boost generally matched the performance of its parent carrier Sprint, in a few cities we saw noticeable differences in download speeds - and that hurt Boost's overall numbers. We recorded an average download speed of 6.5 Mbps - by far the worst of any carrier. But that's not the case, and it's no secret why: Cricket warns you that it's going to cap your download speeds at 8 Mbps on all but one of its monthly data plans, and we can verify that the carrier isn't lying. CricketĬricket uses AT&T's network, so you'd think that it would benefit from AT&T's fast speeds in the same way that Metro rides T-Mobile's LTE coattails. If you opt for Straight Talk, pay close attention to which Big Four carrier has the best performance in your area. T-Mobile had the slowest download speeds of the Big Four Carriers in New York, and sure enough, the Straight Talk numbers weren't as good using that network as they were with the Verizon SIM. To see if our theory that the network you use with Straight Talk plays a major role in how strong your performance is, we went back to some test sites in New York, replacing our Verizon-tied SIM card in our Straight Talk-supplied Galaxy S9 with a T-Mobile one. In fact, in only one city did it take longer than a minute to download Discord on Verizon's network. It also turned in the fastest average time on our app download test, with a blazing-fast 28-second average. It had both the fastest download and upload averages across our eight test cities. It's no mystery why Verizon has tightened its grip on the top rank in our network testing. Here's how the different carriers rank in our tests. To determine our final rankings, we looked at both download and upload averages as well how close the gap was between different carriers we also considered how carriers fared when downloading mobile apps. We also downloaded Discord (a 40MB file) from Google Play and timed how long the app took to install if the app didn't download after 5 minutes, we stopped the test and listed its download time at 5:00 for that location.Īfter determining average download and upload speeds for each location in each city, we used those results to come up with an average performance number for all six cities. We ran Ookla's app five times at each location to record an average download and upload speed for each carrier. Those test sites included an equal mix of outdoor and indoor testing. In each of the cities, we selected six test sites based on geographic diversity and popularity. We conducted our testing from June to August 2018. Adam Ismail conducted testing in New York and Philadelphia Jorge Jimenez ran tests in Houston and Dallas Philip Michaels tested in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle and Meghan McDonough conducted testing in Chicago. We used the same phones to test the different networks in eight cities. In the case of Boost, we bought an S9 directly from the company tied to its network. Seven of the carriers we tested supplied us with a test unit tied to their network. We conducted our testing using the Galaxy S9. (In our past tests, we've included Virgin Mobile, but during our test period, Virgin was positioning itself as an iPhone-focused carrier, and we use Samsung Galaxy phones in our testing to ensure a level playing field - iPhones use different modems, depending on the carrier you select.) In addition to the Big Four wireless providers - AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon - we also looked at four discount carriers: Boost Mobile, Cricket Wireless, Metro and Straight Talk. Chicago: Verizon (Runner-up: AT&T/Sprint).Los Angeles: Verizon (Runner-up: T-Mobile).San Francisco: AT&T (Runner-up: Verizon).New York: Verizon (Runner-up: Straight Talk).(Straight Talk uses other carriers' networks, too, and when we tested with different SIMs, the speeds weren't as fast.) But Straight Talk, which lagged other carriers in previous tests, turned in a stellar performance when using a SIM card tied to Verizon's leading network. Outside the Big Four, Metro by T-Mobile (formerly Metro PCS) remains the fastest discount carrier, riding the strength of T-Mobile's network to the fourth-fastest average download speed.
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