Good news, T-Mobile customers: You can claim bragging rights over your friends on other mobile networks… for now.
That’s because the latest quarterly rankings from Ookla’s Speedtest platform (which is owned by Mashable’s parent company, J2) placed T-Mobile at the top of the network pack in terms of overall speed. In its first quarter report for 2021, Speedtest shows T-Mobile’s performance outpacing rivals AT&T and Verizon.
The three networks were ranked by “Speed Score,” a metric Speedtest uses that’s supposed to be all-encompassing for analyzing network performance. The math is explained on the company’s website, but the main thing to know is that the Speed Score weighs download speed very heavily, since that affects user experience more than anything.
Here’s how the Speed Score list played out for the first few months of 2021:
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T-Mobile: 50.21
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AT&T: 48.38
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Verizon: 41.25
Since it’s just one company’s metric, this is by no means a definitive read on which mobile network is the best. These things also fluctuate over time; it should be noted that AT&T — not T-Mobile — was on top in the fourth quarter of 2020. Network expansion, location disparity, and other factors can play into how the rankings shake out over time.
Still, if you were wondering how your provider compares to the others, Speedtest is a pretty good indicator. So if you’re a T-Mobile customer, you’d be justified in lording these numbers over your friends. We don’t recommend that, as they probably won’t be your friends for very long if you do it. Your call.