Portland's Fastest Mobile Network: Report

PORTLAND, OR — Uploading and downloading from the web, making and taking calls, or just trying to send a text can present different challenges, frustrations, and successes depending on what cell service provider you use and where you are at the time. To help answer the question of which carrier is currently the best in your area, PC Mag on Tuesday released the results of its eighth annual Fastest Mobile Networks survey.

Since 2010, PC Mag has annually tested the data speeds from carriers AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless in cities across the nation, and from 3G to 4G and LTE — and soon 5G — accessibility and speed has improved a lot in the eight years since PC Mag began conducting its tests.

"Compared with 2017, we're seeing faster, more consistent LTE connections on all four major US wireless networks," Sascha Segan wrote for PC Mag. "Peak speeds have jumped from the 200Mbps range to the 300Mbps range, average download speeds have bumped up by 10Mbps or more, and latency has dropped by 10ms. That's an impressive change in one year, and it continues the trend of improvement that we've seen over the past several years of testing."

Over the past year, all service providers continued to improve individual performances, particularly T-Mobile, but Verizon once again came away as PC Mag's #1 fastest mobile network in the nation for the fifth consecutive year.

"Verizon has won our national award for several years running now," Segan wrote. "The carrier doesn't often trumpet its network upgrades — but quietly, in the background, it's laying down the latest network technologies on a massive amount of spectrum."

Breaking up the nation into six sections, North and Southeast, North and South Central, and North and Southwest, PC Mag found Verizon beat out the competition in five areas — which Segan called a testament to the company's longevity and status as one of the original wireless carriers.

However, in Portland — one of the 36 cities visited by testers — Verizon was runner-up to T-Mobile as the area's best mobile carrier.

According to PC Mag, "T-Mobile won with the fastest average upload and download speeds across our 14 Portland test sites, and T-Mobile's network was notable for not really having any slow spots — it was fast pretty much everywhere we went, in all four quadrants of Portland."

To see how carriers fared in the rest of the country, check out the PC Mag test results here. And for information on the testers' methodology, click here.

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