How do AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile stack up? We’ve looked at their customer growth, and this week on the GeekWire Radio Show, we take a closer look at their network performance. Our guest is Bill Moore, the CEO of RootMetrics, a company that studies and regularly reports on the performance of the major wireless carriers.
RootMetrics recently released a new national report on the U.S. wireless carriers, examining how they compare in areas including networks speeds, reliability, call quality, and texting in different parts of the country.
We dive into the trends with RootMetrics’ Moore starting at 9:00 in the show below.
See our previous coverage of the results, and here’s the overview from the report.
While Verizon and AT&T top the charts, all networks are getting better. We saw improvements across the board in data speed and data reliability, which are fast becoming keys to everyday mobile experience. The biggest improvement stories belong to T-Mobile and, especially, Sprint with its marked call improvement. Although T-Mobile finished lower in our national results, it recorded the third most awards at the metro level and remained ahead of Sprint at this level of our testing. The upgrades from these two networks are clearly starting to take hold and are impacting performance, in particular, at the metro level. In short, performance is trending in a positive direction, and consumers are benefiting from the changes we’ve seen.
We start with our news roundup, covering topics including Best Buy’s new engineering center in Seattle, and Facebook’s big Seattle engineering expansion.
In this extended podcast version of the show, I also provide an update on my “Comcast Diet,” my effort to cut my monthly cable bill in half. (As a starting point, see Dwight Silverman’s helpful post for tip on buying your own cable modem to eliminate your monthly rental fee.)
Also listen for a second chance at our GeekWire Trivia Challenge, with a chance to win tickets to the GeekWire Anniversary Bash, March 26 at the Showbox SoDo.
App of the Week: Do Camera by IFTTT, for iPhone and Android.
