Race to 5G: Sprint Now Leads in US 5G Coverage (2024)

SEPTEMBER UPDATE—The big news for 5G rollouts last month was coverage. Sprint got the first points for coverage on our Race to 5G meter, now that it claims to cover 11 million people with its 5G network in nine cities: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and Washington, DC.

Sprint is benefitting from having an easier path to 5G than the rest of the US service providers. Like carriers in the rest of the world, Sprint is installing 5G on "mid-band" spectrum—the upper half of today's existing 4G frequencies. That means Sprint can use its existing cell sites rather than having to install thousands of new antennas for short-range millimeter-wave frequencies, and potential 5G phones can use existing antennas rather than expensive, finicky millimeter-wave arrays.

That last bit means Sprint was also able to bring in a new 5G phone supplier, OnePlus. The OnePlus 7 Pro 5G costs $840, a significant discount from the $999 LG V50 and the $1,299 Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. In the past, OnePlus has said it only wants to work with 5G carriers that are avoiding millimeter-wave, and Sprint fits the bill.

Sprint's rollout in its most recent cities was delayed a bit, mostly due to its supplier Nokia. But it's up and running, and according to Ookla Speedtest Intelligence, it's delivering average speeds around 227Mbps across the nine cities it covers. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company.)

There's the rub for Sprint's approach. The carrier has much less spectrum at mid-band than other carriers do in millimeter-wave, meaning it can't hit the gigabit speeds that other carriers have been promising. On the other hand, do gigabit speeds matter if you can't hit the network at all?

Verizon and AT&T also expanded their coverage with prominent cities. Verizon increased its city count to nine (it says 10, but really Minneapolis/St. Paul is one metro area) by adding Phoenix. But just as we've seen in its other cities, coverage is very limited—basically some key areas of downtown Phoenix and the ASU campus, while Sprint covers most of Phoenix's broad sprawl. Verizon did add two new devices: the Inseego M1000 hotspot and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ phone.

Verizon still leads in our Race to 5G rankings by having the fastest network and offering the most devices. Verizon's network is compatible with two Motorola phones, two Samsung phones, an LG phone, and a hotspot, and it clocked average speeds over a gigabit this month.

AT&T went up to 21 cities by adding New York. But, well, we're still not sure where in those cities. AT&T is keeping its 5G network for business and developer customers only. The carrier said it will support the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G later this year, but that phone will only work with an upcoming, slower, wide-range 5G network, not the existing fast, short-range network that it's spent all year building.

T-Mobile is stuck at six cities for the moment, with only the Galaxy S10+ 5G phone. It will also release the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G in its slower, longer-range version, which won't be able to handle the existing networks in its six cities. According to a story in Light Reading, the carrier has frozen its purchases of new network equipment to focus instead on pushing its merger with Sprint. The last anyone at T-Mobile told me, the carrier still plans to launch some low-band 5G this year, but maybe that is changing.

No phone can handle all the flavors of 5G being launched in the US

No 5G Saviors Yet

I expected the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G to clear up our 5G low-band/high-band confusion by being the first phone to handle all the different flavors of 5G network. It looks like that isn't happening, so for now, we still have various incompatible 5G networks, mostly with hardly any coverage and weird service plans, with devices that aren't going to be able to handle future buildouts.

That isn't the case in the rest of the world, which is swiftly eclipsing the US on 5G. We were first, but Europe's focus on easy mid-band buildouts means its cities are getting fast, widespread 5G with service plans a fraction of the price of ours.

Some of the United States' problem is that we bet on mmWave, which turns out to be a thorny, difficult technology to use compared with mid-band 5G. Some of it, I'm pretty sure, is that Sprint and T-Mobile have both been delayed by how focused they are on their merger talks rather than on innovating and competing.

I'm hoping some announcements later this year will start to re-even the playing field. Qualcomm is promising integrated chipsets that may make it easier to work with mmWave, and I've heard there's at least one more prominent 5G phone launch before the end of the year. We'll keep tracking the Race to 5G here at PCMag, so stay tuned.