How Fast Is Sprint’s Network, Really?

Sprint’s LTE network is steadily improving. In any case, it’s not the best in the nation. So Sprint overreached today with a press release and blog entry touting some very selective Nielsen results demonstrating Sprint’s “LTE Plus Network” similar to the fastest nationwide.

I run a big drive-test project every year called Fastest Mobile Networks, and I’m in frequent touch with some of the big players in network measurement: OpenSignal, RootMetrics, Sensorly, Mosaik, and Ookla testmyinternetspeed.org (which shares a parent organization with PCMag.) After examining Sprint’s release and blog entry, I wanted to get out a few things.

Nielsen’s methodology is very different than everyone else’s. Most network testing firms simply siphon a ton of data down a carrier’s pipe to see how fat it is. As per Sprint, Nielsen uses an application running out of sight on Android phones, which records download speeds “in like manner applications, for example, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, Snapchat, and others.” The organization says it surveys “tens of thousands” of users in 44 metro areas nationwide.

Those results disadvantage T-Mobile because of its Binge On plan, which can be detected as choking video to 1.5Mbps. So Nielsen’s T-Mobile numbers are dragged somewhere around the entirety of the video streams that it has decided are 1.5Mbps each, which say nothing regarding the quality of the network.

Sprint CTO John Saw’s post about the network win likewise cites RootMetrics, saying that Sprint came out very close to Verizon in Houston, Austin, Boise, and Denver. Houston and Denver were two of the three cities where Sprint won or tied for the lead position in Root’s latest round of speed tests. Root tests 125 cities.

Sprint’s LTE Plus cases likewise seem to be based on download numbers as it were. In our Fastest Mobile Networks tests, we’ve been giving upload speeds some weight because social media has made uploads more significant with time. As per Ookla’s Speed test Intelligence data, Sprint has the slowest mean LTE upload speed of the four significant carriers over the previous 30 days, with an upload speed of 4.79Mbps.

What’s more, notice it says nothing regarding coverage, which is Sprint’s big LTE bogeyman.

Sprint’s super-quick network relies on 2.5GHz spectrum, which has very short range. As indicated by OpenSignal’s Q3 2015 “State of LTE” report, Sprint had the least LTE coverage of any US network, with its customers receiving LTE 64 percent of the time, as compared to T-Mobile at 77 percent, AT&T at 81 percent, and Verizon at 84 percent. When we drove around the nation last May, we discovered Sprint’s LTE network had nowhere near the reach of Verizon’s or AT&T’s. In any case, that was last May.

That’s the Bad News

The overreaching here is a little terrible because Sprint is in actuality doing a heck of much better than it used to.

Nationwide, during 2015, Sprint’s mean LTE download speeds increased from 9.76Mbps to 15.28Mbps, as per Speed Test Intelligence. That’s still in fourth place, yet it’s an a lot bigger bounce than anyone else experienced, and it vaults Sprint from uncompetitive to competitive.

There’s comparable improvement in a great deal of significant cities, and unlike with Nielsen, different measurements agree here. In Chicago, for instance, RootMetrics says that Sprint’s media download speed increased from 13.1Mbps to 22Mbps between May and November. That’s “LTE Plus” in that spot. Speed test Intelligence agrees: in Chicago, Sprint averaged 10.41Mbps down on LTE in May, and 16.95Mbps in November, a better download speed than T-Mobile (in spite of the fact that everyone else crushed it on uploads.)

Sprint’s customer experience will improve further as more people get off old phones, which don’t bolster its new carrier aggregation technology, and onto phones like the iPhone 6s, which do. When we reviewed the iPhone 6s, we discovered Sprint download speeds were 50 percent faster than on the iPhone 6, all because the new phone supported the new network technologies.

So no, Sprint’s LTE network isn’t the fastest nationwide, especially in the event that you take upload speeds into account. Be that as it may, it’s a whole lot faster than it used to be. Over the previous year, it’s become genuinely competitive just because since 2009. What’s more, coupled with newer devices, its super-cheap plans merit investigating, in spite of the fact that we’re despite everything looking out for more data about coverage. Our yearly drive testing, done this May, will help with that piece of the story.

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