PCMag.com is all over the place as it prepares to rank cities by cellular speed
When he rolls into Houston, all Michael Muchmore wants is 15 minutes parked in the shade — in more than a dozen locations around the city.
Sometimes, if the place and the time are right, he’ll have a doughnut as well.
In the back seat of Muchmore’s rented Buick are four Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphones velcroed to a pair of wooden boards. As he drives, then sits and waits, the devices talk to towers for each of the four big cellular companies, testing the quality of their signals. Muchmore is one of nine PCMag.com employees who drive the nation’s biggest cities for an annual cell-service quality survey called Fastest Mobile Networks.
“A lot of time is spent sitting in nondescript parking lots,” said Muchmore, who normally writes about business software for PCMag.com, formerly PC Magazine. Houston is the third stop on a circuit that includes Dallas, Austin and New Orleans.
There’s good news, and some surprises, as to how Houston compares and which carrier is the zippiest in town in the ninth Fastest Mobile
“Unfortunately, we can’t be everywhere.” Michael Muchmore, PCMag.com
Networks survey, which is now live online.
For this year’s survey, Muchmore and his colleagues around the country visited most of the country’s big cities between May 1 and May 23. Exceptions include San Antonio, for example, due to driving times and distance.
In each city, the drivers try to make stops in a variety of neighborhoods scattered across each locale. That’s particularly challenging in Houston because the city is so spread out, Muchmore said.
“To save time, we limit our stops inside the (Sam Houston Tollway). Unfortunately, that means we miss a lot of key locations,” he said.
For example, although he tries to hit the cellphone waiting lots at major airports, Bush Intercontinental Airport is not included because it’s north of the tollway. He did stop at Hobby Airport’s cell lot, though.
On this year’s visit to Houston, Muchmore made 15 stops, in locations ranging from tony River Oaks to NRG Stadium to Jacinto City to working-class Sunnyside.
There was a heavy concentration of stops on the near west and southwest sides, though that could be partly explained by picking up a Houston Chronicle reporter for a ride-along.
“We try to be as inclusive as we can, but someone always says, ‘Why didn’t you test in my neighborhood?’ ” Muchmore said. “Unfortunately, we can’t be everywhere.”
As he drives, each of the four smartphones in the back seat are running a custom version of a speed-testing app made by Ookla, which is owned by PCMag’s parent company, Ziff-Davis. The app runs constantly, whether the drivers are parked or moving.
As they drive between cities, the app is checking the cellular performance of carriers in rural areas.
All this data is then sent to PCMag’s headquarters in New York City, where lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan crunches the numbers in a database. There are 120,000 data points each year, Segan said, requiring a huge amount of computing power.
The 4G networks of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon are tested for multiple factors: maximum and average download and upload speeds; percentage of downloads over 5 megabits a second; reliability; and average ping, or latency.
PCMag used Galaxy S9s this year because the newer smartphones have the ability to work on the carriers’ fastest networks. For example, they are among the few devices that can talk to AT&T’s 5G Evolution network, which, despite the “5G” in its name, is really an accelerated version of 4G data service.
In Houston, T-Mobile took top honors, as it did last year. All four carriers did well on reliability.
The biggest surprise, Segan said, was in the category of download speeds.
“Sprint had the fastest download speeds,” Segan said, “but its network is extremely asymmetrical. Their uploads are so much slower than the competition, they’re not in the running to be the winning carrier.”
Houston came in second in Texas cities for overall speeds, behind Dallas, which is a big telecom hub and home to AT&T’s corporate headquarters.
Speaking of AT&T, Segan said it did best between cities.
“Across rural Texas, AT&T is pretty much the default carrier,” he said.