Originally Posted by
Majuki
There are many factors, which is why the decision on choosing a mobile network provider always comes down to what works best for your circumstances. Which bands is T-Mobile providing in your area vs AT&T? Perhaps there is a higher concentration of T-Mobile subscribers in your area. It's highly situation dependent.
For instance, we recently moved a few miles away, and it's a world of difference on T-Mobile. At the old place I couldn't pick up a 5G signal with my phone. I had to go down the street. At the new place, I can. I remember years ago I lived in an apartment building with concrete walls. The only way I'd get reception there is if I went out onto the balcony, and I had to rely on Wi-Fi calling for the time I lived there. I still stuck with T-Mobile because elsewhere it worked well for me.
Agreed, I've found it is highly variable from provider to provider and place to place. I went from T-Mo to AT&T for speed related issues, but my research over the past year was very interesting.
Since covid began and I effectively stopped traveling, I was suddenly more dependent on domestic data than ever before. Especially since my home ISP (Spectrum) likes to flake out on occasion, I was eager to get a cell provider w/ tethering that was fast/stable enough to support video calls & presentations when my home internet went down.
When I started my testing of carriers, I was on T-Mobile postpaid. I also tested Verizon, AT&T, and a host of MVNOs of the big 3 carriers. What I found was that around town (Cleveland) each of them had places where they were the best. On average around town with a 5G iPhone 12 Pro max, T-Mobile had the highest data throughput... often ranging 300mbps-600mbps download speeds. Verizon of course had pockets downtown where I could even reach gigabit speeds if standing outside... cool but not super useful. In my testing (often in dual-sim config) I was able to find buildings I go to where one carrier would work fine, the other had zero service. There was no real winner in my experience.
AT&T is an interesting case. I found their 5G doesn't get as fast on average as T-mobile, but ironically their LTE service is often 250mbps-300mps! More importantly for me though, was service at my home. For some reason, while all three carriers have the same number of "bars" at my home. AT&T was significantly faster than the other two. With AT&T I can get 50-90mbps down / 8-15mbps up in my home. With T-Mobile & Verizon, I struggled to get 8-10 down, .05 up. Even then those connections were so unstable I could often not even open flyertalk without the page loads timing out. On AT&T I honestly don't notice I'm on Cellular vs my home wifi. That ultimately ended up being the deciding factor. Plus now that AT&T has capped their international day pass to 10 days of charges per month, the roaming aspect is good enough for me to keep for when I go back to traveling.
Long story short... you really need to test out each carrier in the specific places you actually go. There is no such thing as a "best" carrier for a region or even a city... it boils down to where you spend your time and where you need the best service specifically. I recommend testing carrier throughput by keeping your current carrier, then experimenting with the others via 1 month prepaid eSims.
The real winner is using two providers on your phone. For a while I was using T-mobile as my primary connection and Visible (Verizon's low cost MVNO) as a backup line on the same phone. Best of both worlds situation. I chose visible (which is often deprioritized and very slow compared to postpaid verizon) because it is cheap and fit my needs as a "backup" connection.