T-mobile still 4th overall per rootmetrics!

If you look at "The United States Winners" it's not a sum of the metro-area rankings weighted by population. Rather, it's a ranking that's quite biased toward rural areas. While T-Mobile has made great strides there, Sprint has a CDMA voice network that is certainly more mature. If you look at Data and Speed, T-Mobile is ahead of Sprint for "The United States Winners", but it trails significantly on voice. On voice, the other three range from 85.2 - 91.2 with T-Mobile way behind at 71.3. For Speed, Verizon and AT&T hit 91.0 and 86.1 respectively while T-Mobile hits 85.8 and Sprint is way behind at 72.2.

I don't think it's unreasonable for what they're testing, but what that is testing isn't so useful. A test in Manhattan should be weighted more than a test in Sidney, MT because there are millions of people in Manhattan and a few thousand in Sidney. But that's not what the test is.

When you compare it to last year on a metro level, T-Mobile has improved a lot. It still has room for improvement, especially on voice outside of urban centers. That doesn't mean it's bad.

Looking at the metro areas, T-Mobile went from 17 "Overall" awards to 40. AT&T sits at 51 (up 1), Verizon at 98 (down 6) and Sprint at 6 (flat). So, RootMetrics definitely sees T-Mobile improving and a very close #3 overall in metro areas. For speed, T-Mobile ties Verizon with 62 wins as they gained a bunch with AT&T a near-ish 3rd and Sprint basically not playing. For data, T-Mobile comes in a close 2nd with twice as many wins as the previous 6 months.

It's not like RootMetrics isn't showing T-Mobile improving. T-Mobile won 2.3x more overall awards and twice as many data awards as the previous 6 months. Even on voice, they won 2.5x more awards than the previous 6 months.

The issue is more that everyone wants to go to "The United States Winners" which probably isn't what you're looking for. "The Metro Area Winners" is much more meaningful to most users since that's where most users live. Heck, I'd love to see a population-weighted metro area winners since a win in NYC or LA is more meaningful than a win in Temecula, CA.

So, some of it is simply what you're reading in the report (or maybe how they're presenting it if you don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt - which is fair given the prominence of less meaningful data that shows T-Mobile in a poor light).

The real concern in the report is Sprint's metro-area data rates. 20% of markets have a median download speed under 5Mbps for Sprint (up from 16%). No other carrier had more than 2.5% of markets averaging under 5Mbps. 66% of Sprint's markets averaged under 10Mbps. That number was 22% for T-Mobile, 10% for Verizon, and 20% for AT&T.

It takes years to really change a network and T-Mobile is doing it the hard way (without buying another carrier). They've done a wonderful job very fast and customers love it. That doesn't mean that AT&T and Verizon have been resting or that Sprint's CDMA network didn't have a head start on suburban coverage. Part of the problem with the report is what people are reading and that problem might be generated by RootMetrics' presentation of the data. But the data shows T-Mobile doing quite well. It won 78% as many "overall" awards as AT&T did for metro areas. For a carrier that was a complete joke 3 years ago, that's amazing.

I know everyone would love to see "T-Mobile is the carrier of America" or something. Take the metro wins, ignore the state and country ratings entirely (since they're biased against places that people live), and be happy.

/r/tmobile Thread