How do U.S. cities rank in terms of mobile services performance? Atlanta is tops, not only in network speed and data performance, but overall, according to RootMetrics’ first half 2015 rankings. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International also topped RootMetrics’ ranking of mobile service performance across the 50 busiest U.S. airports.
The third-largest U.S. city, Chicago ran a close second to Atlanta in overall mobile service performance. The two largest U.S. cities – New York and Los Angeles – came in 74th and 89th, near the bottom of RootMetrics’ rankings.
Washington D.C. scored lowest among the 10 largest U.S. cities, finishing 95th. Denver didn’t show well either, finishing 118th of the 125 cities in which RootMetrics tested mobile services performance.
Cities with Best Mobile Performance
In addition to network speed, reliability and data performance, RootMetrics assessed mobile services performance according to call and text performance. Scores were weighted by the estimated national percentage of subscribers for each network so that a network with more users carries greater weight than one with fewer.
The top 5 metro areas for mobile services:
- Atlanta, GA (pop. 4.51M)
- Chicago, IL (pop. 8.60M)
- Knoxville, TN (pop. 558,696)
- Nashville, TN (pop. 969,587)
- Jacksonville, FL (pop. 1.06M)
The bottom 5:
- Hudson Valley, NY (pop. 423,566)
- Reno, NV (pop. 392,141)
- Omaha, NE (pop. 725,008)
- Colorado Springs, CO (pop. 559,409)
- El Paso, TX (pop. 803,086)
1H’15 results were similar to last year’s, RootMetrics points out. That said, Atlanta moved up from 10th last year to number 1 this year. Chicago ranked number 1 in RootMetrics’ 1H’14 assessment.
Other cities that made big moves higher included Nashville, which moved up from 79th in 1H’14 to fourth in 1H’15. Knoxville moved up from 69th to third.
