Apteligent (www.apteligent.com) and analyst firm, STL group, have put together a report quantifying the customer “app experience” on 27 mobile networks in 7 countries. The findings on U.S. carrier providers was especially surprising considering analysts and market observers often cite the U.S. as a mobile market that has achieved higher broadband prices owing to its operators’ network investment. 

So how do U.S. carriers Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T measure up?

° All four of the major US mobile operators are in the bottom half of the ranking table.

° The best-performing US operator, T-Mobile, only scores 45 – a full 31 points below Bouygues Telecom (France) and 4 points below the median operator. 

° Verizon and AT&T, the U.S. market leaders, score only 43 and 37 respectively and Sprint, as already noted, is in the bottom 5 with 33.

° All the U.S. operators perform poorly on Error Rate – a real surprise given that many applications have been developed in the U.S.-based start-ups and established companies and the vast majority are hosted in the datacenters of U.S. Internet giants – Amazon and Google.

° No U.S. player scores particularly high on download speed (despite the prevalence of 4G) and Sprint, and AT&T perform particularly poorly with 5 and 8 points respectively out of a possible 25.