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Ookla has released its annual written report on U.s.a. download speeds, powered by SpeedTest Intelligence. The US improved its download speeds markedly from 2022 to 2022, merely is withal ranked poorly overall relative to our overall economical strength. The data set Ookla uses is drawn from over 12 one thousand thousand speed tests performed during Q1 and Q2 of 2022 by two,841,471 unique devices. Overall hateful download speed was 27.33Mbps while upload performance was viii.63 Mbps. Download bandwidth increased more than 20 percent compared with the same period in 2022, while upload bandwidth grew by just 1.4 percentage.

SpeedScore-Nationwide

According to the report, T-Mobile's recent performance improvements are the event of aggressive deployment of 600MHz spectrum. The document states:

Because this type of spectrum propagates farther, it allows the operator to cover vast geographical areas more efficiently and utilize fewer prison cell sites in the process. At this signal, T-Mobile has dedicated virtually all of its mid-ring spectrum portfolio to LTE operations, keeping only the last ten MHz sliver of spectrum for 3G legacy users and packing the tiny GSM channels into the LTE and UMTS baby-sit bands for those using 2G-only devices.

In order to stay alee of the bend and prepare for 5G and the predicted surge in data need, T-Mobile has been deploying License Assisted Access (LAA) and using a technique called Carrier Assemblage. LAA is an avant-garde LTE technique which combines the existing licensed spectrum with unlicensed spectrum in the 5 GHz band. This strategy provides a significant capacity boost in targeted dense urban areas, creating the possibility of real world speeds budgeted 600 Mbps.

Rural speeds, information technology must be noted, are lower than urban ones, and the gaps vary by company. Sprint takes the heaviest hit in mobile in accented terms, while AT&T has the smallest difference between its urban and rural network speeds. T-Mobile and Verizon accept like hits when moving from one segment to the other.

Urban-vs-Rural

Verizon, however, has the largest coverage area in America's rural markets. Of the users it surveyed, Ookla reports that 49 percent of all rural samples came from Verizon, while 30.5 percent were from AT&T, 12.i percent from T-Mobile, and 8.three percent from Dart.

Ookla expects this to be the last year nosotros see 4G and 4G-equivalent technologies deployed across the industry. 5G technology should start rolling out in 2022, in early markets — and remember, one reward of 5G is that it can be deployed in a diverseness of spectrum bands and using some legacy 4G LTE equipment. At that place's likewise the option to use targeted millimeter wave networks to offering gigabit or near-gigabit performance, at least in theory. We remain skeptical of just how much advantage these networks will deliver in practice, given that their performance and range is oftentimes attenuated by water vapor in the atmosphere. And interestingly, Sprint may be a network to lookout over the next 12 months. While it remains the slowest US network overall, it grew its performance the well-nigh from 2022 – 2022 and airtight the gap between itself and AT&T.

Disclaimer: Ookla is endemic past Ziff Davis, the parent company of ExtremeTech.