The Best and Worst Cities for AT&T in 2022
AT&T was a firm third place in our 10,000-mile Best Mobile Networks road trip. While the carrier had excellent rural reliability—a real selling point for Big Blue and its faithful fans—its urban 5G network fell far below T-Mobile's and Verizon's on 5G speed.
That may be about to change. AT&T's mid-band 5G network is slowly starting to spread nationwide, and it has performance much more like what we saw from T-Mobile and Verizon this year. By 2024 for sure, AT&T could be in a very different position.
For now, here are the five test cities where we saw the best overall AT&T performance, and five where we saw the worst. It's important to note that in each of these lists, the cities are in alphabetical order, not a "best to worst" order.
These are the cities where we saw AT&T's best performance in testing.
AT&T won Atlanta not by having the fastest network, but by having the most reliable. AT&T's network was the most consistent, and had the lowest rate of dropped calls and failed connections in the Atlanta area.
AT&T's 5G in Atlanta feels very much like 4G—and for the most part it is 4G, just with a bit sliced off and transformed to 5G encoding. But that's enough to give most people a reliable 25Mbps down and 5Mbps up, as our tests showed. AT&T also had the lowest latency of the three carriers in Atlanta, making web pages feel faster.
The fastest location we saw on AT&T was in Boston. Boston was the only city where AT&T broke a gigabit, on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. AT&T followed up with the most reliable data network in Boston. We had a concerning spate of dropped calls at one point, but they were all close to each other (maybe one messed-up tower) and they didn't outweigh all of our other factors.
AT&T's 5G+ popped
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