Our Methodology: How We Determine the Best Mobile Networks
And lots of it.Specifically, we examine over 2 million speed and quality tests performed on mobile networks across the US in the first six months of 2026. In the end, we land on a final metric that lets us instantly compare carriers, regardless of their service areas. In the US, network performance data for this annual report is supplied by our partners, BestPhonePlans and sister site CoverageMap.com, drawn from their speed-testing apps for iOS and Android.
- ▪And lots of it.Specifically, we examine over 2 million speed and quality tests performed on mobile networks across the US in the first six months of 2026.
- ▪In the end, we land on a final metric that lets us instantly compare carriers, regardless of their service areas.
- ▪In the US, network performance data for this annual report is supplied by our partners, BestPhonePlans and sister site CoverageMap.com, drawn from their speed-testing apps for iOS and Android.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/articles/best-mobile-networks-methodology |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 26 14:02:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T14:10:25.985Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T14:10:25.985Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4041y2STQzbw · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How do you rank the best mobile networks? Here at PCMag, we turn to the data. And lots of it.Specifically, we examine over 2 million speed and quality tests performed on mobile networks across the US in the first six months of 2026. We then layer in data on network coverage, plan pricing, and wireless subscriber satisfaction. In the end, we land on a final metric that lets us instantly compare carriers, regardless of their service areas. The result is the Best Mobile Networks. In the US, network performance data for this annual report is supplied by our partners, BestPhonePlans and sister site CoverageMap.com, drawn from their speed-testing apps for iOS and Android. The crowdsourced data provided includes coverage area and speed.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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