Verizon claims to have 5G coverage in downtown Boston, the Fenway area, and
around Union Square in Cambridge, but our test phone didn’t encounter any of
it. If it had, that would have likely made Verizon the winner here, as the city was
so competitive overall.
CHARLOTTE: AT&T
AT&T has been the leading carrier in North Carolina for a very long time, so I’m
really not surprised that AT&T won both Raleigh and Charlotte. The carrier’s
performance was miles ahead of both T-Mobile’s and Verizon’s in Charlotte,
with download speeds pushing double the competition.
One interesting trend is that AT&T did much better than T-Mobile or Verizon in
tests taken while moving rather than tests measured when standing still.
I don’t want to underplay how far T-Mobile has come in North Carolina over the
past few years, though: The carrier didn’t even used to have coverage. Now it
has generally reliable coverage, and its 5G network makes its speeds relatively
competitive with the other two.
Verizon and T-Mobile have 5G in Charlotte, but those networks couldn’t
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and its 5G speeds are much better than its 4G speeds, AT&T was so far ahead of
T-Mobile that the latter just couldn’t catch up. Verizon says it has 5G in Uptown
Charlotte and scattered other places around town, but we only saw it at one test
spot near Uptown, and we got better performance from Verizon 4G at various
locations than we did from 5G at that spot.
Photo^ credit:^ digidreamgrafix/shutterstock.com