Find the Fastest Wireless Network Near Your City

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I’m not the biggest fan of Verizon’s stance on net neutrality , wireless carrier costs, or the fact that I still can’t get FIOS in Silicon Valley, but according to PCMag, Verizon Wireless has the fastest wireless connection. service in the country . The mobile carrier may not have the fastest service where you live, or even any decent service (there are some populated areas in the Bay Area that seem like black holes for Verizon’s coverage), but overall the best.

There are many sites you can use to find out which of the major wireless carriers offers the best service where you live, including the carrier’s own coverage maps that will likely tell you that you will receive the fastest service in history . Convenient, but not always accurate.

Overall, I like the PCMag score for several reasons. First, it’s practical. The team travels around the country with a handful of devices measuring performance , stopping at several locations in major metropolitan areas:

“The software runs tests every 90 seconds. We measured the number of downloads and uploads to a neutral server that is not a carrier, as well as pings to the nearest server on the Ookla network. During the trip, we tested downloads from 196 different servers and pings to 434 different servers, performing about 88,000 test runs.

We stopped at 12-20 locations for at least 15 minutes each in our 30 cities. We averaged the data for each location and then averaged them together to get an overall result for the city. Aggregated travel data between test points was included in the overall average as two more locations. Since we are testing LTE networks, we did not average the speeds on non-LTE networks. If the phone disconnected from the LTE network, it was considered a failed test. “

PCMag is also quick to point out the differences between its driving tests and crowdsourced tests you can find on sites like OpenSignal – not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other, it’s just another.

Most importantly, PCMag also notes that just because it’s an overall winner doesn’t mean Verizon is necessarily the best carrier for you. You will want to review the PCMag test results in the area closest to where you live, and even so, you may have more experience with another carrier.

Below is a complete list of the cities that PCMag explored, along with the names of the winners in each of them. Be sure to click to view the PCMag analysis for your favorite metropolis, because it might make sense to pick a non-ranking carrier based on the measured speeds of other carriers and the offerings they offer. If you can save $ 20 a month (or get more data) on an operator that is almost as fast as the most efficient operator in your area, why not?

You should also check out PCMag testing in rural and suburban areas , in case any of the cities listed are still slightly far from where you live.

As always, the best way to find out which carrier is best for you is to ask those around you what your friends are using, what is their connection speed and coverage, and if they would mind if you lend your phones for the day so you can do some speed tests yourself (with OpenSignal on iOS or Android ; CellMapper on Android ; or something like Sensorly on iOS or Android ).

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