Please Read the OpenSignal Mobile Broadband Report Before Changing Mobile Carriers
Choosing the “best” carrier has never been easy as you never know what service you will receive until you settle on a new carrier (and / or phone). Fortunately, mobile broadband industry analyst OpenSignal has a few more data points to play with – over 3 billion in fact per day – and have released a new report comparing coverage, upload and download speeds, and latency for “ large four-inch wireless carriers.
Here’s the spoiler: If you’re buying a new service, you might want to go to Big Red. Verizon wins in nearly every category in the overall OpenSignal report, which was built using over 10 billion different measurements taken from over one million individual devices over a three-month period at the end of 2018.
OpenSignal publishes wireless reports twice a year, covering countries such as the US, UK, India, Australia, and Brazil. The best thing about them is that they are not limited to broad, versatile claims: you can look at charts based on data from different regions to see if there is any difference in OpenSignal’s recommendation based on how well the carriers are serving your particular region. And you should definitely pay attention to them, because the best provider really varies from city to city.
In addition to reporting, you can also use the OpenSignal mobile broadband app ( iOS , Android ) to get crowdsourced wireless coverage data in your area. It allows you to compare mobile services in your area, shows coverage maps by carrier, and offers a number of handy tools you can use to optimize your services, including finding cell towers and checking internet speed.
While the app (and this company) succeeds in collecting data from its users, I give them credit for being open and honest in this regard: the app clearly describes how it will use the collected data and asks you to enable or disable when you open it for the first time. You can use the app without data sharing for testing, although you need to give it access to location data for coverage maps and tests to work properly.