Research: AT&T has the fastest mobile network in the US in 2019, displacing Verizon in the top spot after five years
Winners by City About Our Tests — All four major wireless carriers in the US are constantly flinging claims at you—they're the fastest, the largest, the friendliest, the best.
Context & Ripple Effects
AT&T's 2019 win ends a five-year reign that began when Verizon topped speed-and-coverage tests across 30 US cities in 2015. The crown was already contested by then — OpenSignal's crowdsourced data had named T-Mobile the fastest 4G network in early 2016, with AT&T lagging — so this result reads less like a new dynasty than one snapshot in a rotating contest.
What makes the rotation notable is where it goes next: within two years T-Mobile converts its spectrum position into a commanding 5G lead, winning 24 cities to AT&T's eight and Verizon's two, and holds the top Speed Score in Ookla's H1 2024 testing.
First-order effects
- AT&T gains the industry's most quotable marketing claim for the year, while Verizon loses the headline advantage it had defended since its 2015 sweep of 30-city tests.
Second-order effects
- Verizon faces pressure to answer with its own benchmark wins or investment messaging, deepening the carriers' dueling-claims arms race that testers like OpenSignal and RootMetrics were already arbitrating.
Third-order effects
- Speed leadership proves rotational and methodology-dependent rather than durable — a pattern that resolves, once 5G arrives, into T-Mobile's sustained dominance over both AT&T and Verizon through 2021 and into 2024.
The trend: US mobile speed supremacy rotates with each network generation and test methodology, and the 5G transition ultimately consolidated it around T-Mobile.