You can't turn on your TV these days without clapping eyes on an actor touting the merits of one of the Big Three U.S. phone carriers. And in each one, the actor looks right into the camera to tell you the wireless carrier they're representing has the best network.
The latest instance features Luke Wilson strolling around a wind-swept prairie and declaring AT&T to be the phone network to beat. This ad echoes a T-Mobile spot that debuted a few months earlier, in which Billy Bob Thornton strolls around a different wind-swept prairie while singing the praises of the Uncarrier.
Three ads for three phone carriers all claiming to offer the fastest, most reliable wireless service — so which one is correct? The answer depends on whose data you're using.
Comparing the phone network ads and their claims
Let's start with the T-Mobile ad, since it was the one that triggered this latest round of "My network is better than yours" back and forth. T-Mobile rolled out the spot in June around the same time it was previewing its soon-to-launch satellite connectivity, and the ad featured Billy Bob Thornton proclaiming that the Uncarrier had overtaken Verizon in the network performance rankings.
"Now the best mobile network in the U.S. is T-Mobile," Thornton says in the ad. "Some fancy experts finished a network test, and T-Mobile sort of opened a can of whoop-up."
The fancy experts in question are from Ookla, a mobile testing firm, which had just released its Speedtest Awards for the first half of 2025. In that testing period, T-Mobile posted the best Speedtest Connectivity score, which measures speed, video streaming and web browsing performance. T-Mobile scored 79.95 in that metric, compared to 75.49 for Verizon and 72.47 for AT&T.
If you thought AT&T was going to take that lying down, you were badly mistaken. The carrier dispatched Luke Wilson to tell its side of the story in an ad that's airing regularly during this month's World Series coverage.
"AT&T is America's first network and it's still the best," Wilson assures us. "That's not me talking, that's the scoreboard."
Or rather, that's the word from Rootmetrics and its testing report covering the first half of 2025. In that report, AT&T gets the nod for best overall network performance, while also winning top honors for network reliability, network speed and call performance. AT&T and Verizon were joint winners in Rootmetrics' data performance and text performance categories.
T-Mobile didn't exactly come up empty in the Rootmetrics report. It's cited for having the best 5G availability, meaning you're most likely to get a 5G signal in more locations. Rootmetrics also called out T-Mobile's "stellar speeds in major cities."
As for Verizon, its current ads are more focused on a promotion that lets AT&T and T-Mobile customers bring in their bill to see if Big Red can offer them a better deal. But the carrier does include a nod to its own network performance in those commercials.
"Better deal, best 5G network," the ad notes, with the fine print in the commercial pointing to the same Rootmetrics report cited by AT&T. And that report does recognize Verizon for offering the best 5G experience along with the fastest and most reliable 5G performance.
And the winner is ... everybody?
Normally, when you have three different companies claiming the same thing, you'd have to assume that two of them are incorrect. But in this instance, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon can all point to third-party reports that back up their claims.
Interestingly, that Rootmetrics report may rank AT&T tops for speed and Verizon the best for fastest 5G, but it also lists T-Mobile as having the highest median speed by some measure — 371.4 Mbps to 192.1 Mbps and 168.7 Mbps for Verizon and AT&T, respectively.
T-Mobile also fares well in a third report that no one's mentioned in any of the recent ads. Opensignal's June 2025 report gives T-Mobile a clean sweep in the overall experience categories, though Verizon wins four of the five 5G categories. Someone get word to Billy Bob Thornton out in that prairie.
The actual truth about network performance is that a lot of it comes down to who has the best signal where you live and work — i.e., the places where you're going to be spending most of your time. For me personally, Verizon performs the best in my neighborhood, something I'm able to see given the sheer volume of phones connected to different networks that I have on hand. Before I moved a dozen years ago, though, AT&T had the best coverage at my old place. I suspect you could tell a similar story about coverage in your neck of the woods.
So the next time an actor appears on your TV screen to talk to you about wireless network performance on behalf of some carrier, know that they have some facts to back it up. But they may not necessarily be sharing the full picture about network performance.
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