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ZDNET's key takeaways

• I tested 5G on country roads and farmland for three days.
• Verizon led in overall network levels, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile.
• T-Mobile was the only network to pull in a 5G signal.

My quest to test 5G has taken me to a baseball game and interstates between Chicago and Nashville. Through the journey, I've carried three phones from the three major US carriers to determine which has the best coverage. I just did it again, but I changed some things up.

Also: I compared Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T 5G coverage on a road trip - and the winner surprised me

I still packed my car for a weekend away, and I still had three phones riding in the back seat. I used nPerf (more on that later) to continuously test carrier and network performance throughout the journey. But this time, I went a little John Denver on you and stuck to those old country roads. Interstates were off the menu. As I mentioned during the Nashville trip, it benefits carriers to build networks where people are, like major cities and interstates. So I wanted to go where people were not.

I also changed up the devices. In the past, I carried three Google Pixel 10 Pro phones. This time, I upgraded to three identical Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultras. One of these was provided by Samsung, and the other two came from AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively. All three ran on eSIMs provided by the carriers.

The setup

This time around, I had a more refined setup. My last trip had a 2-by-4 board zip-tied to an Anker battery with bolts connecting to cheap $5 phone clamps. It worked well enough.

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I zip-tied the phone holders to an old piece of PVC that was clamped to the top of a tripod and held in place by a ratchet strap. I said it was "refined," not "good." One of the benefits of this setup was I was able to glance in the rearview and see all three phones running. Side note: nPerf on the S26 Ultra crashed far fewer times than on the Pixel 10 Pro. I was relieved we stopped as often as we did on the Nashville trip because I often found one of the phones no longer running. No such issue here.

Like the Nashville trip, I connected all three phones to an Anker Solix portable battery. This time, I used the C1000, with three USB-C ports and five AC outlets, one of which powered my daughter's electric blanket for most of the trip. We had power to spare.

Destination anywhere

With the speed limit of country roads limiting the distance we could travel, I still wanted to cover a decent amount of ground. I also wanted to go where people were not, and I can assure you there are no people in Douds, Iowa. 

That's a real place, established by an ancestor of mine back in the 1800s. I'd been there once before as a kid, but since I had a day to kill and this was in range, this was my intended target. Douds is not actually a town -- it was never incorporated. But it had a post office and a train station, and back then, that was enough.

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On the way home, I wanted to skirt southern Wisconsin, so we headed to Platteville, Wisc., where I had visited once as a preteen because the Chicago Bears had preseason training there. I don't remember anything about that trip, except the name Platteville, because back then, I cared about the Bears even less than I do today. Go Cubs.

From there, we headed to Janesville, Wisc., where my daughter ran over a ¼-inch-thick carriage bolt and embedded it in our tire. Four new tires later, we finally found ourselves home, back in the Chicagoland area.

The results

After contacting nPerf and requesting a data dump of all my results, I ended up with over 52,000 data points across the three carriers, detailing the network type and signal strength each phone picked up. Just to recap, the three categories I tracked were the network signal type, level, and strength of each carrier throughout the 15-hour trip. 

Also: Forget Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra: I found alternatives that are nearly as good for less money

Network type is broken down between LTE, LTE advanced, and 5G, both standalone and non-standalone. Network level is basically the number of bars the phone has at any given time, and network strength is measured in negative decibels, where the highest number (the lowest negative number) is best. Here's how things shook out:

Once again, T-Mobile was the only carrier that recorded any standalone 5G signal. Non-standalone 5G uses 4G networks to establish connections. It has higher latency (which is bad) and is considered a sort of Band-Aid to putting together a 5G network. Not only that, but T-Mobile beat out the other two carriers in 5G signals by a ridiculous margin, checking in at just under 90% of the time. 

But that's not the whole story here.

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Verizon was the winner at the network level by a good margin, with AT&T coming in a not-too-distant second place. None of the three carriers had very good signal strength overall, though Verizon again led here, with almost 44% of the time recording a good, but not great, signal. The other two carriers were not far behind in this category, though. 

So overall, T-Mobile may have recorded 5G signals most of the time, but the other two carriers recorded stronger signals a majority of the time.

Anecdotal evidence

I drove the entire way to Iowa City and rode in the back the whole way home. In preparation, I downloaded podcasts to listen to, since I anticipated the signal might be spotty -- that was the point of the experiment, after all. So, while I can't speak to my experience with signals on the way there, on the way home, I was tethering to my phone most of the time so I could work. 

During that time, southern Wisconsin was the only area where I experienced complete internet failure.

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Most of the time, I was able to muddle through, though the internet certainly slowed from time to time. On the farm fields of Wisconsin, I got very little done, but that downtime didn't last long -- perhaps a total of 20 minutes, give or take -- and I noticed it on two separate occasions. So, overall, it wasn't too bad. It's also worth noting that the phone I tethered to was the Oppo Find N6, which was never meant to work on US soil, so that may have played a part as well. 

But the fact that T-Mobile (my carrier) recorded a network level of 1 for 52% of the trip doesn't speak well. At the end of the day, all three carriers have strengths and weaknesses when you leave the interstate. If I hadn't been working with a T-Mobile phone as my personal phone on the trip, I'd be very worried about these results. But my anecdotal evidence suggests things are not so bad. 

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The takeaway here is that if you live off the interstate, most carriers are going to struggle, and those "Fastest network" commercials are not for you. There is work to be done there, but overall, it's not nearly as bad as I expected.

I can skip downloading podcast episodes next time.