During the Super Bowl, Mint Mobile was offering new customers three months of free service. In my earlier post about the promotion, I said that I thought the deal wouldn’t have any serious catches or gotchas that made it less appealing. Sure enough, that’s how things panned out. I really appreciate that Mint Mobile doesn’t engage in gimmicks to nickel-and-dime its customers.
As expected, new customers were able to get free service, a free SIM card, and free shipping:
Before the promotion launched, I wondered whether Mint Mobile would try to push people into plans that renewed automatically. I’m happy with the approach Mint took. On the checkout page for the promotion, Mint conspicuously featured details about its auto recharge program. While the auto recharge box was checked by default, the program was clearly explained, and the box was easy to uncheck:
In my last post, I wrote:
Sure enough, Mint extended the promotion. Here’s a screenshot from Mint’s website last night:
When I checked Mint’s website shortly after midnight on the West Coast, the promotion looked like it was still running. When I checked Mint’s website this morning, the promotion was over.
RootMetrics recently tweeted about how its latest analyses prove which networks are the fastest and most reliable:
I’m a big fan of RootMetrics, but the tweet annoyed me. There’s a ton of flexibility in how network evaluators can approach their work. Will performance data be crowdsourced from consumers or collected via in-house testing? How will data be cleaned and aggregated? What regions will be included? Etc.
Phrases like “fastest network” and “most reliable network” are ambiguous. Do you determine the fastest network based on average download speeds, median download speeds, or something else?
RootMetrics’ tweet is especially odd in light of their latest report. Depending on which speed metric you choose to look at, you could argue that either Verizon or AT&T has the fastest network. AT&T narrowly beats Verizon in terms of median download speed. Verizon narrowly beats AT&T in RootMetrics’ overall speed scores.1
RootMetrics’ most recent report includes information about network speeds in city centers. Here’s how RootMetrics’ describes the tests:1
The results are presented with the following graphic that lists the median download speed in megabits per second from the fastest and slowest network in each city:2
Despite Sprint’s lousy performance in RootMetrics’ overall, national-level results, Sprint still managed to offer the fastest speeds in 3 of the 13 city centers RootMetrics considered. The results are consistent with a point I’ve tried to emphasize in the past: if you tend to stay in one area, you shouldn’t worry too much about national-level network performance.
I haven’t seen information about which plans RootMetrics’ test devices use on each network. In fact, I’m not entirely sure RootMetrics uses service plans that are available to regular consumers. My guess is that RootMetrics’ test devices have prioritization and quality of service levels at the high-end of what’s available to regular consumers. If my guess is correct, RootMetrics’ test devices have higher priority than many budget-friendly services that run over the Big Four networks. A few examples of those services:
Subscribers using low-priority services are especially likely to experience slow speeds in congested areas. I’d be interested in seeing RootMetrics rerun its city-center tests with low-priority services.
Yesterday, RootMetrics released its latest report on the performance of U.S. wireless networks. I’d been looking forward to this report. RootMetrics’ drive testing methodology has some advantages over the approaches used by other companies that evaluate network performance.
RootMetrics’ results were generally unsurprising. As with the last report, Verizon was the big winner, followed by AT&T in second place, T-Mobile in third, and Sprint in fourth.
Here are the overall, national scores out of 100 for each of the major networks:
RootMetrics also reports which carriers scored the best on each of its metrics within individual metro areas. Here’s how many metro area awards each carrier won (along with the change in the number of rewards received since the last report):
RootMetrics’ results align with the results of other recent evaluations suggesting aspects of AT&T’s network are becoming more competitive. AT&T fared particularly well in RootMetrics’ latest speed metrics. While Verizon narrowly beat AT&T in the final speed score out of 100 (90.7/100 for Verizon vs. 90.2/100 for AT&T), AT&T narrowly beat Verizon in aggregate median download speed (33.1 Mbps for AT&T vs. 32.7 Mbps for Verizon).
It appears that RootMetrics’ final speed scores are based on something more than median download speed. That may be a good thing: having consistent speeds is arguably much more important than having high average or median speeds. Still, I’m frustrated that I can’t figure out exactly how the final speed scores are derived. RootMetrics continues to be non-transparent about the math underlying its analyses.
A section of the latest report suggests that Verizon may do a particularly good job of avoiding sluggish speeds:
The new report includes details about RootMetrics’ recent tests on 5G networks. I found the 5G results unsurprising, and I’m not going to comment on them further at this time. I think 5G deployments are still in too early a stage for the results to be of much interest.
This post is the first of hopefully many link roundup posts.
Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) often appear to be prohibited (or at least discouraged) from explicitly acknowledging which networks they run over. Still, it seems that most MVNOs don’t have to keep their host networks entirely secret. The effects of these policies can be kind of funny.
The MVNO Red Pocket operates over all of the major U.S. networks, but it only mentions Sprint by name. The following screenshot comes from a part of Red Pocket’s website that lists the networks the company offers service over:
The unnamed networks are color-coded to match the colors used in the host networks’ branding: AT&T in blue, T-Mobile in pink, and Verizon in red.
The MVNO Ting currently operates over Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks. Verizon will be added to the list soon. Today, Ting published a blog post about the upcoming addition. Ting still isn’t naming the networks it works with, but the company is making easy-to-interpret statements like: “In 2020, Ting will be on every major coast-to-coast network except AT&T.” The blog post included a video where the names of each network the company works with were censored out:
An SEC filing Comcast published today showed that Xfinity Mobile has been adding subscribers quickly. In the last quarter, Xfinity Mobile added 261,000 new lines.1 Overall, Xfinity Mobile had a net increase of 816,000 lines in 2019, bringing its total subscriber count at the end of the year to slightly over two million lines.2 It’s now fair to say that Xfinity Mobile is one of the largest MVNOs in the U.S.
By my math, Xfinity Mobile’s subscriber base grew by about 66% in 2019.3 It will be interesting to see whether Comcast can keep that kind of growth rate going forward.
By one method of accounting, Xfinity Mobile looks unprofitable. However, the brand seems to be moving in the right direction towards profitability:4
At the moment, Xfinity Mobile presents a pretty good value proposition for current Xfinity Internet customers. Going forward, I’m not sure whether Comcast will keep Xfinity Mobile’s prices competitive to encourage growth or increase prices to make each subscriber more profitable.
Today, Opensignal released a new report on the performance of U.S. wireless networks. The report details results on seven different metrics.
Here are the networks that took the top spot for each metric at the national level:
It’s important to interpret these results cautiously due to limitations in Opensignal’s crowdsourcing approach. Since performance data is collected from actual subscribers’ devices, factors not directly related to underlying network quality may impact the organization’s results. For example, if subscribers on a network are unusually likely to use low-end devices or live in rural areas, that will affect the outcome of Opensignal’s analyses. Still, Opensignal’s results are interesting; they’re drawn from a huge data set involving primarily automated performance tests.
The most notable result in the latest report might be AT&T’s first-place finish on the download speed metric. In the previous Opensignal report, T-Mobile won first place for download speeds, and AT&T took third place. I’ve recently been critical of the methodologies used in some other evaluations that suggested AT&T had the nation’s fastest network. While many of those methodological criticisms still stand, the fact that Opensignal’s arguably more reliable methodology also found AT&T to have the fastest network leads me to believe I was too harsh. I’ll be interested to see whether AT&T also takes the top spot for speeds in RootMetrics’ upcoming report.
Two new metrics were introduced in this report: Voice App Experience and 4G Coverage Experience. The Voice App Experience metric assesses the quality of voice calls via apps like Skype and Facebook Messenger. I’m not exactly sure how the metric works, but it looks like all four networks received similar scores. Opensignal deemed all these scores as indicative of “acceptable” quality.
The 4G Coverage Experience metric adds a bit of complexity to the previously existing 4G Availability metric. The coverage metric assesses 4G availability across areas all Opensignal’s users find themselves in, regardless of their network.
TracFone, the company behind several large MVNOs, appears to be working on a new product called SmartSIM. Apparently, some TracFone customers recently received a marketing email that mentioned SmartSIM.1 I was briefly able to access NoDeadZone.com, a website that shared some basic information about SmartSIM. Oddly, the website now automatically redirects to locations.totalwireless.com (Total Wireless is a brand owned by TracFone).
While NoDeadZone.com was accessible, it offered a short video explaining SmartSIM. Apparently, the technology will allow subscribers to switch rapidly between multiple networks based on which network offers the best signal. There’s been some speculation about how up-and-coming eSim technology may enable more people to take advantage of dynamic network switching of this sort. However, the video I gave me the impression that SmartSIM would involve a conventional, removable SIM card rather than an eSIM. At the moment, I’m unsure if TracFone is licensing switching technology Google Fi built, introducing new technology, or something else.
NoDeadZones.com allowed visitors to enter their zip codes to see if SmartSIM was available where they lived. I tried several zip codes, and all were ineligible. It seems that other people had the same experience. I’m not sure whether any zip codes were really eligible for the service.
So far, I haven’t heard of TracFone responding to any requests for more information about SmartSIM. I’m curious about the lack of communication along with the decision to redirect NoDeadZone.com to the main Total Wireless site. It’s enough to make me wonder whether a mistake was made that led SmartSIM to become public knowledge before TracFone intended.
I’ll be keeping close tabs on how the story develops. Dynamic network switching has the potential to improve wireless service and change how it’s priced. With switching technology, it may be possible to charge different rates to different subscribers based on factors like a subscriber’s location, the extent of network congestion, or the quality of service a subscriber receives. Dynamic pricing could potentially lead to far more efficient network usage than conventional pricing—which might ultimately lead to a decrease in how much consumers pay for wireless service.
