State of Mobile USA: Quantifying the bar for 5G to beat

Opensignal has benchmarked the experience smartphone users receive in every US state and the fifty largest cities immediately prior to 5G’s launch so it’s easy to see to what extent 5G offers an improvement. In the last year, the download speeds experienced by smartphone users in the US have improved little, rising from 17 megabits per second (Mbps) to 21.3 Mbps between the first quarter of 2018 and the same period in 2019. There’s lots of room for improvement but only a new technology like 5G is likely to lead to a step-change improvement in the mobile network experience. Key findings:

• Across 50 states the download speeds smartphone users experienced ranged from 32.9 Mbps in NJ to 12.1 Mbps in MS. The fastest states were a mixture of mid-Atlantic and New England population centers alongside US heartland states OH and MN, which ranked 4th and 5th, respectively.
• Technology hub cities did not excel when compared with the fifty largest cities: San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin ranked in the bottom half of the largest fifty cities on measures of download speed, upload speed and video experience.
• Cleveland (33.8 Mbps) and Minneapolis (32.2 Mbps) offered users the fastest download speed experience across the fifty largest cities. Speeds in the leading cities were almost twice as fast as bottom-placed Oklahoma City.