February 2020

Despite not having the usual Tom Brady-dominated game this year, an excellent performance was put on in Miami for those lucky football fans able to attend. Kansas City Chiefs will bring home the trophy, but one question remains: how well did mobile operators perform under pressure as over 60,000 people took to their phones to celebrate (or commiserate) with each other? 

Overall, Verizon had the fastest median download speed at 21 Mbps on Super Bowl Sunday for users in and around the Hard Rock Stadium.  AT&T provided the second fastest median download speed for users at 17 Mbps, followed closely by T-Mobile and Sprint with 16 Mbps and 14 Mbps, respectively. 

Median download speed for Super Bowl game

21 Mbps	17 Mbps	16 Mbps	14 Mbps

Although an important part of understanding a user's experience, download speed don't tell the whole story. Tutela also calculated the upload speed and latency results for the game. For upload, T-Mobile was the fastest at 11 Mbps. Meanwhile, Verizon had the lowest one-way latency at 30 ms. Despite having the slowest download and upload speeds, Sprint did well to have the second lowest latency result at 35 ms – crucial for maintaining a responsive network. 

For the full breakdown on how all four operators performed in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, as well as during the big game itself, you can dig into the live dashboard here.