I’m 3 weeks into my t-mobile test drive. Currently I’m with Verizon, and my partner is with AT&T but we are looking to merge. Just came back from a camping trip in rural California, was testing all three along the way in hopes to find the best one for the two of us and hopefully save some money.
I was very impressed with T-Mobiles 2.5ghz midband 5G. It seems if I had service, it was 5G UC all the way up 5 and various other highways and into the little town before the national park, pushing 100-300 mbps the whole time. It was very fast, although there were a few dead zones of just nothing here and there and once we started climbing mountains it was completely dead in the water, hopefully their partnership with Space X fills in this gap. In the city it works great with no real coverage problems.
Verizon still had the best coverage of the three, although it was mostly LTE, not even “nationwide 5G” but plenty fast, usually around 20-50mbps. I get C-Band in the Bay Area with 300-800mbps down, but once we left and got on the highway I didn’t see it again at all. Maybe that will change this December when they add more spectrum. The main win with Verizon is I didn’t see any dead spots along the way and even in the mountains almost all the way to the campsite maintained at least 1 bar of useable LTE for maps and texting/calling while the other two were dead. This is probably what’s going to keep me on Verizon despite the price, as we were able to find a bar here and there to check in with our cat sitter during the trip while the other two were no signal.
AT&T was the worst by a long shot. I was surprised because I knew my partners service was worse than mine in the city (slow speeds, many dead zones. Doesn’t even get signal on our street), but I expected it to be better than T-Mobile. The most dead spots of the three, both on the high ways and in the mountains. They don’t offer midband 5G at all right now, even in the city. Half the time on 5 it would show one bar of LTE or “5Ge” but would be unusable, couldn’t even load google, while the other two were happy. It did have a couple spots of useable service in the mountains where T-Mobile didn’t, but Verizon was always holding strongest.
All in all I’m very impressed with T-Mobile and how far they’ve come, especially with 5G speeds and surpassing AT&T’s coverage, at least in urban and rural Northern California. But I will be sticking with Verizon for the two of us due to best overall coverage despite the higher costs, but I do hope they can catch up with T-Mobile’s urban and suburban midband which is blazing fast and top of the 5G game right now.
