United States coverage

What the United States numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 64 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 11 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in United States when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over T-Mobile and AT&T. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Mobile operators in United States

• Verizon: Verizon reported 144.75 million postpaid and prepaid connections at the end of 2023, 38.6 percent of the total for the largest publicly traded carriers and the largest share among them in the FCC's 2024 marketplace report.
• T-Mobile: T-Mobile reported 119.7 million postpaid and prepaid connections at the end of 2023, a 31.9 percent share among the largest carriers, up from 102.06 million at the end of 2020.
• AT&T: AT&T reported 106.34 million postpaid and prepaid connections at the end of 2023, a 28.3 percent share among the largest carriers, and separately about 135 million connected device and wholesale connections.
• UScellular: T-Mobile closed its purchase of UScellular's wireless operations on 1 August 2025, taking over more than four million customers, its stores and selected spectrum. The towers and a significant portion of the spectrum stayed with the renamed Array Digital Infrastructure.
• EchoStar and Boost Mobile: In May 2026 the FCC approved the assignment of EchoStar's 600 MHz and 3.45 GHz licences to AT&T. Boost Mobile continues as what the companies call a hybrid network operator, running its own 5G core while carrying customer traffic over AT&T's cell sites.

Older networks in United States

• The national carriers retired 3G during 2022: AT&T began phasing it out in February, T-Mobile finished Sprint's CDMA network on 31 March and its own UMTS network on 1 July, and Verizon set 31 December as its completion date. The FCC warned that visitors arriving with 3G phones would be affected.
• After Verizon retired its CDMA network, a phone that only supports 3G, or a 4G phone without HD Voice (VoLTE), can no longer make or receive calls, send texts or use data on Verizon, and such devices cannot be activated.
• T-Mobile retired its 2G GSM network on 3 August 2026. It also shut Sprint's LTE network on 30 June 2022 and retired an older network security standard on 1 April 2026, which can disrupt some features on phones from 2017 or earlier.

5G in United States

• The FCC's C-band auction of the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz band, Auction 107, closed in February 2021 with 81.17 billion dollars in gross bids, and 21 bidders won a total of 5,684 licences.
• Auction 110 for the 3.45 GHz band ran from October 2021 to January 2022 and raised 22.51 billion dollars in gross bids from 23 winning bidders, making further mid band spectrum available for 5G.
• Auction 108 for 2.5 GHz band licences ran in July and August 2022 and raised 427.8 million dollars in gross bids from 63 winning bidders.
• T-Mobile launched the first nationwide standalone 5G network on 4 August 2020. Standalone mode freed its 600 MHz 5G signal from depending on mid band 4G, letting it reach further from each tower and deeper into buildings.
• The spectrum AT&T bought from EchoStar covers about 99 percent of the US population. The FCC waived the standard 600 MHz build out schedule on condition that AT&T meets tighter deadlines than it had proposed.

Network notes for United States

• No US network covers the whole country. Each national carrier reports 4G LTE coverage of at least 95 percent of the population but only at least 68 percent of road miles, and 5G at 7/1 Mbps or better for at least 75 percent of people and 35 percent of road miles.
• AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon together held about 82 percent of the mobile spectrum the FCC counts in its competition screen as of June 2024, measured by megahertz weighted by population covered.
• Numbering data put US mobile connections at about 492 million at the end of 2023, an increase of about 5 percent on the end of 2022.