Mobility
From New York City to San Jose, what are the average 4G download and upload speeds, and what carriers offer the best speed, reliability and coverage?
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How do the biggest U.S. cities fare in 4G network coverage?
4G LTE network coverage is expanding worldwide.
While the U.S. enjoys rapidly expanding 4G coverage -- made possible due to spectrum auctions and extensive investment in networks by carriers -- the United Kingdom has only recently had 4G LTE networks switched on. Some European areas, including Brussels, remain a black spot , but the foundations have been laid for these services in continents including Africa .
However, finding the best cities for coverage can prove to be a difficult task. Some web and app-based firms, such as Opensignal (available on Android and iOS), allow you to find better mobile signals, nearby free W-Fi networks and test their connections, and also allow you to search 4G coverage based on location.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the coverage available in the ten largest U.S. cities by population. Opensignal researchers used data compuled by speedtests actively run by the app users to compile the average download and upload speed of 4G LTE speeds, and have compared reliability, speed and coverage rankings to give you a good idea of how 4G performs in each city.
The speed rating used is a combination of upload, download and latencies -- with those three factors weighted equally -- coverage looks at area of a city where there is 4G readings from all 4 major networks (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint) and seeing which have the most signals, and reliability was calculated by seeing the percentage of time a device is able to successfully access data over the 4G network.
Caption by: Charlie Osborne
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