In These 8 Cities, AT&T and Verizon Users Need New Phones ASAP

pcmag.com:

If your AT&T or Verizon phone is stalling out, it's time to dive into the C. The two carriers are rolling out mid-band 5G (also known as C-band) in cities around the nation, and as we drove 10,000 miles looking for America's best mobile network, we saw the difference starting to become clear.

T-Mobile users can likely sit pretty. As long as you have a 5G T-Mobile phone, it supports the carrier's mid-band, which made T-Mobile the best and fastest mobile network in America in our tests this year.

But AT&T and Verizon users may need to step up. Not all AT&T and Verizon 5G phones support C-band, and C-band is much better and faster than their ordinary 5G. For a list of phones that support C-band, see our frequently updated list. (It's for Verizon, but things are similar for AT&T.)

Both AT&T and Verizon call their slower, low-band 5G "5G". They call C-band, as well as the even faster but hard-to-find mmWave, "5G+" on AT&T and "5G UW" on Verizon. The following cities are where we saw the biggest differences between regular "5G" and the "5G+" or "UW" varieties—as well as enough of the faster stuff to matter.

Note that this list isn't inclusive of all 30 cities we tested. The network-detection software I wrote quit sometimes, and so we weren't able to survey every single one of our test cities for 5G+ status. But we learned enough to give you some good leads.

In the images below, blue dots mark where we found "5G+" on AT&T and red dots mark where we saw "5G UW" on Verizon.

Verizon is really struggling in Austin, and T-Mobile was our winner in that city. But with both Verizon and AT&T, upgrading to C-band is going to reap you major benefits to the tune of at least tripling your speeds.

T-Mobile was the fastest network in Boston,