- The latest Ookla report reaffirmed that T-Mobile has the Best Mobile Network in the U.S.
- Scoring for the award took into account a bunch of things that consumers do with their phones every day
- But Verizon maintained the lead in the Best Mobile Coverage category
Here we go again. Ookla today said T-Mobile had the Best Mobile Network for the first six months of 2025, a title T-Mobile celebrated with great fanfare last month.
This latest award is based on data for the first six months of 2025 and once again, T-Mobile earned top honors, scoring 79.95 in Ookla’s Speedtest Connectivity contest compared to Verizon’s connectivity score of 75.49 and AT&T’s score of 72.47. Last month’s Ookla report was based on data collected during the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025. That report for the first time showed T-Mobile as having the best overall network – not just in 5G.
It’s a big deal and one that T-Mobile certainly is shouting from rooftops and billboards across the country. Granted, T-Mobile has been crowing to industry analysts and journalists about its 5G network prowess for several years, largely thanks to its marriage of low-band 600 MHz with Sprint’s treasure trove of mid-band 2.5 GHz spectrum. But that doesn’t mean its message has resonated with consumers. Last month, T-Mobile President and CEO Mike Sievert vowed to make a much bigger effort to take its “best network” message to the masses.
While T-Mobile is making hay about its network status, Verizon and AT&T aren’t sitting by idly. Verizon today announced that it won awards from J.D. Power for network quality for the 35th time in a row and Best 5G Network, Fastest 5G Network and Most Reliable 5G Network based on RootMetrics’ data. Last month, RootMetrics – which was acquired by Ookla in 2021 – deemed AT&T as the one with the best overall network performance in the first half of 2025.
One big question
Still, we’re sort of hung up on something in this latest Ookla report and here’s why.
According to Ookla, Verizon still shines in one very big category: overall coverage. Verizon took home the title of Best Mobile Coverage during the first half of 2025, with a score of 29.9%, indicating that it had greater geographical coverage across the U.S. than its competitors. AT&T came in second, with a score of 24.9%. T-Mobile was in third place with a score of 22.9%.
That’s not the least bit surprising. Ookla’s Best Mobile Coverage category measures all cellular technologies combined, including 3G, 4G and 5G. Verizon has won this award three times in a row, and no other operator has won it since its inception, according to Ookla.
Coverage is a big deal. Fierce asked Ookla: How does T-Mobile win the Best Mobile Network prize when it doesn’t have the best overall coverage?
The answer: While speed and coverage are an important part of any network’s capabilities, “the true measure of a network’s performance lies in how it enables real-world activities,” an Ookla spokesperson said. “The Speedtest Connectivity Score provides a rich, contextual understanding of the actual consumer experience by factoring in not just speed, but also the responsiveness (or latency) of common online tasks like web browsing and video streaming.”
Fair enough. That matches what T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson told Fierce during a phone interview after T-Mobile’s big shindig in Bellevue, Washington, last month. He said the earlier Ookla study included more than 570 million test points and 6 million different devices, all analyzing the kinds of things that consumers do with their phones every day, such as web browsing and video streaming.
T-Mobile's coverage
Back to the coverage question. Doesn’t Verizon have a coverage advantage because of its vast 4G LTE network? After all, that’s one reason Verizon wasn’t in as big a hurry to go to 5G standalone (SA); it could still take advantage of its broad LTE coverage using its non-standalone (NSA) network, which uses an LTE core.
T-Mobile execs had a few answers to that. For one thing, T-Mobile has “incredibly good” roaming agreements with other carriers to cover areas where it doesn’t have the greatest coverage, Ewaldsson said. Roaming agreements are pretty standard across the industry and have been for decades.
In terms of square miles in the U.S., T-Mobile covers essentially the same amount as Verizon, according to T-Mobile President of Marketing, Strategy and Products Mike Katz. Of course, there will be places where Verizon’s terrestrial network works and T-Mobile’s doesn’t, and the same is true for places where T-Mobile’s network will be better than Verizon’s.
The point is that people will find coverage in most areas where they need to use their mobile devices. When connected to the T-Mobile network, “your experience is going to be the best – by a lot,” Katz said.
Of course, all the carriers are talking about using satellites to fill in dead zones, and today, T-Mobile officially kicked off its commercial T-Satellite service with Starlink, making it available to its customers (some for free, some not) as well as Verizon and AT&T customers for $10/month.
That’s good news for consumers who want to text from hiking trails, disaster zones or far-away job sites, but it’s still not going to match the speed, capacity and low latency of terrestrial networks.
Suffice it to say, there will be a market for third-party analyst reports sizing up the carriers’ networks for the foreseeable future. Eventually, they’ll all probably include comparisons of the operators’ satellite connectivity options too.