Here are the carriers with the best wireless coverage

‘No other large countries have managed to build the vast 4G infrastructures the US and Japan have deployed, yet American and Japanese LTE networks can’t match the speed offered by most of the world’s 4G operators.

In OpenSignal’s testing, both Verizon and T-Mobile are getting 4G speeds of 12 Mbps on average, against the national 4G average speed of 9.9 Mbps. According to the report, Zong’ LTE time coverage was 56% while this poor availability of LTE signals made its’ ranking 130 among all the countries having mobile broadband coverage. “It doesn’t matter how fast the LTE connection is”, says OpenSignal analyst Kevin Fitchard, “if you only have access to it 50 percent of the time, it’s not going to be a very interesting network for you”.

Since then, RootMetrics dropped Sprint to third in Kansas City, behind Verizon and T-Mobile in a tie for first.

Verizon has long trumpeted its network performance to wireless customers, but T-Mobile could be giving Big Red a run for its money.

T-Mobile’s ascendency shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to those who have tracked its recent infrastructural gains. The average speed worldwide was 13.6 Mbps.

Verizon subscribers have Verizon’s LTE network available to them the most at 87% of the time, and it’s slowly rising.

Verizon is still the LTE king among US mobile carriers, but T-Mobile wants to be the heir apparent. AT&T was second with 2.2 Mbps while Verizon and Sprint followed with appalling speeds of 0.66 Mbps and 0.64, respectively. Again, Sprint sucks: just 70 percent of its customers can get a 4G connection.

OpenSignal, which takes its data from a network testing app installed on the handsets of 181,927 U.S. users, explains how T-Mobile’s growth came to be in such a short amount of time. Well, you’ll have to thumb nearly all the way down the list to No. 55, where America sits between Russian Federation (10Mbps) and Argentina (9Mbps) with an average LTE download speed of 10Mbps. “Though US 4G networks continue to get faster, they’re just not keeping up with the world’s quickening LTE pace”, the report said. But it does give a good indication as to how USA networks compare to each other, and how they’re performing relative to other nations.

Looking at OpenSignal’s last the State of LTE report, the US languishes in the bottom 20 slowest average speeds for LTE, at less than 10Mbps.