I measured AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s 5G signals in a small town — here’s what the data says

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Highlights taken by ZDNET

• I tested 5G on rural and rural roads for three days.
• Verizon led in all network rankings, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile.
• IT-Mobile is the only network that has a 5G signal.

My quest to test 5G took me to a baseball game and places between Chicago and Nashville. On the trip, I carried three phones from three major US companies to determine which one works best. I just did it again, but I changed some things.

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I still parked my car all weekend, and I still had three phones riding in the back seat. I used nPerf (more on that later) to continuously test carrier performance and network performance throughout the trip. But this time, I went to you little John Denver and stuck to those old country roads. Interstates were not on the menu. As I said during the Nashville tour, it’s beneficial for carriers to build networks where people are, like big cities and midtowns. So I wanted to go where people are not.

I also changed devices. In the past, I owned three Google Pixel 10 Pro phones. This time, I upgraded to three identical Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. One of these was provided by Samsung, and the other two came from AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively. All three used carrier-issued eSIMs.

Setting up

This time, I had a more refined setup. My last trip consisted of a 2-by-4 board zip-tied to an Anker battery with bolts that attach to cheap $5 phone jacks. It worked well enough.

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I attached the phone holders to an old piece of PVC that was bolted to the top of the tripod and held in place with a ratchet strap. I said “refined,” not “beautiful.” One of the advantages of this setup is that I was able to look in the background and see all three phones working. Side note: nPerf on the S26 Ultra crashed a lot less than the Pixel 10 Pro. I was relieved that we stopped like we did on the Nashville tour because I often found one of the phones not working. There is no such issue here.

Like the Nashville trip, I connected all three phones to an Anker Solix portable battery. In this case, I used the C1000, which has three USB-C ports and five AC outlets, one of which powered my daughter’s electric dress for most of the trip. We had the power to save.

Your destination is anywhere

As the speed of the country roads reduced the distance we could travel, I still wanted to cover the perfect spot. I also wanted to go where there are no people, and I can assure you there are no people in Douds, Iowa.

That is a real place, founded by my great grandfather back in the 1800’s. I had been there when I was a kid, but since I had a day to kill and this was at a distance, this was my intended goal. Douds is not actually a town — it was never incorporated. But it had a post office and a train station, and that was enough at the time.

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On the way home, I wanted to drive around southern Wisconsin, so we headed to Platteville, Wisc., a place I had visited as a kid because the Chicago Bears had preseason training. I don’t remember anything about that trip, except the name Platteville, because then, I cared less about the Bears than I do today. Go Cubs.

From there, we headed to Janesville, Wisc., where my daughter ran over a ¼-inch carriage bolt and drove it into our tire. Four new tires later, we finally found ourselves home, back in the Chicagoland area.

Results

After contacting nPerf and requesting a data dump of all my results, I ended up with over 52,000 data points across all three carriers, detailing the type of network and signal strength each phone picked up. Just to recap, the three categories I tracked were the network signal type, level, and strength of each carrier throughout the 15 hour trip.

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The type of network is divided between LTE, advanced LTE, and 5G, both independent and non-autonomous. Network level is basically the number of bars a phone has at any given time, and network strength is measured in negative decibels, where the highest number (the lowest negative number) is the best. Here’s how things went:

Once again, T-Mobile was the only carrier to record any independent 5G signal. Non-sovereign 5G uses 4G networks to establish connections. It has high latency (bad) and is considered a kind of Band-Aid for 5G network integration. Not only that, but T-Mobile beats the other two carriers in 5G signals by a ridiculous margin, coming in just under 90% of the time.

But that’s not the whole story here.

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Verizon won the network ranking by a good margin, with AT&T coming in a not-so-distant second. None of the three carriers had the best signal strength overall, though Verizon once again led here, recording a good, but not great, signal about 44% of the time. The other two carriers were far behind in this category, however.

Overall, T-Mobile may have recorded the strongest 5G signals most of the time, but the other two carriers recorded the strongest signals most of the time.

Anecdotal evidence

I drove it all the way to Iowa City and rode in the back all the way home. In preparation, I downloaded podcasts to listen to, as I expected the signal to be spotty — that was the point of the test, after all. So, while I couldn’t talk about my experience with signals on the way there, on the way home, I was using a modem most of the time to work.

At that time, southern Wisconsin was the only place where I experienced complete internet failure.

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Most of the time, I was able to chat, although the internet was slow at times. In the fields of a Wisconsin farm, I did quite a bit, but that downtime didn’t last long — maybe 20 minutes total, give or take — and I noticed it on two separate occasions. So, overall, it wasn’t too bad. It’s also worth noting that the phone I connected to was an Oppo Find N6, which was never made to work on US soil, so it may have been involved as well.

But the fact that T-Mobile (my carrier) recorded a network level 1 on 52% of trips doesn’t speak well. At the end of the day, all three carriers have strengths and weaknesses when moving between regions. If I hadn’t been working with a T-Mobile phone as my personal phone on the trip, I would have been more concerned about these results. But my anecdotal evidence shows that things are not that bad.

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The takeaway here is that if you live off the interstate, most carriers will struggle, and those “fastest network” ads aren’t for you. There is work to be done there, but overall, it’s not nearly as bad as I expected.

I might skip downloading the podcast episodes next time.