RootMetrics Ranks Top U.S. Cities For Mobile During 1H 2018

- August 16, 2018

Knoxville, St. Louis, and Minneapolis have been listed as the top three cities for the best overall mobile experience according to the 1H 2018 U.S. metropolitan rankings recently released by research firm RootMetrics. Although not the biggest cities in the country, of the 125 listed in the report, those three stood above the majority of the competition in most of the metrics considered by the firm. Knoxville, which scored 98.1 overall and 73 in terms of population, also ranked at the top for reliability and call performance while being bumped to number two for data performance. The city placed fifth in terms of speed and all the way down at 43 for texting – although it did score just 0.2 points below the top spot in that latter category. St. Louis comes in at number 20 in terms of population and took slots one, three, and six in the data, speed, and reliability categories. It was ranked at 17 and 58 for calls and texts, respectively. Finally, Minneapolis rose to number two and three for speed and data performance but ranked at 13, 29, and 51 for reliability, calls, and text despite holding the number 16 spot in terms of population.

Minneapolis didn't manage to break the top ten in any category during RootMetrics' previous analysis of the U.S. market but another notable city in the analysts' rankings is Allentown Pennsylvania. After finishing 2017 without a single category being scored above the number 69 placement, the metropolitan placed fourth overall and in the top five for speed and data performance. That's thanks to increased carrier activity in the number metropolitan ranked at number 60 for population, according to the analysts at RootMetrics. Meanwhile, Fort Wayne Indiana is also noted as ranking in the top ten across five categories, in spite of its call performance ranking landing at 23. On the other end of the spectrum and despite its status as a top technology city, Madison fell in at number 114 in overall mobile performance while metros such as Washington D.C. and Seattle ranked 18 and 29. From the bottom up, the lowest ranking cities of all those ranked were Santa Rosa, Hudson Valley, and El Paso.

Another major takeaway from the latest U.S. Metropolitan rankings is that the population of a city doesn't necessarily mean that service will be great. RootMetrics does indicate that in some cases a single carrier was able to bring up the overall score of an area for any given metric since the ranking does take each available carrier into account. That means a single great carrier could boost a city's rank substantially even if other carriers in the area lag well behind. However, larger cities also tend to have more dense populations and that can cause congestion on networks. So the fact that only Chicago – which ranked third in population among the most populous locations – managed to score above the number ten spot in any ranking is hardly surprising. The city scored eighth in data and seventh in speed but nudged in just under the top ten, landing in spot twelve overall.