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Hey everyone,
As some of you may have heard, carriers have been adjusting their networks to comply with the Table Mountain Radio Quiet Zone, which has caused cell coverage to become noticeably worse in parts of Longmont, Niwot, and Boulder.
u/EsKetchup had an awesome post where they used CellMapper to show how LTE signal gets weaker around the quiet zone.
But I was curious. What about 5G? What about data speeds? How did the quality of service change before and after the carriers adjusted their networks?
To find out, I walked, biked, and drove on every street in Longmont while running speed tests on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to map out cell coverage. By chance, I had already done this once before in 2023. Last week I went out again to get fresh data and see how the performance compared.
I was surprised!
- Around the quiet zone, speeds dropped significantly
- All the black squares are areas where the tests failed to run, even when the phones said they had service
- AT&T actually DOES now have 5G towers in Longmont! Cool to see they have much faster speeds now (in some parts, at least)
- The last image is an analysis of the service complaints in this Reddit post by u/Puzzleheaded-Sky2284. And what do you know! Most of the service complaints line up where the speeds are measurably poor
Now, why the heck would I do this? Twice!
It turns out I review cell phone plans on YouTube. Part of picking a plan is understanding what network is best where you live. So, in 2022 I co-founded CoverageMap.com to build out crowdsourced maps of cell coverage. That's what I used for this comparison.
The maps are free to browse and have much richer detail, such as upload speeds, latency, and signal strength, and you can zoom in to see even smaller squares.
If you'd like to contribute, you can use the free app to run a test in your neighborhood. The map updates in real time, and even failed tests show on the map as areas with confirmed no service.
I hope that is helpful!
Stetson