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Last week, while my beloved Cubbies were fighting for their playoff lives, I decided to see how speeds were doing on the three biggest carriers in the US. Since my hometown of Chicago was one of the first test beds for 5G, I’ve been maintaining an interest in it throughout my career.

You see, back when 5G was still in its infancy, we were sold two big promises about 5G — speed and capacity. For speed, the biggest example we were given was “You can download an entire movie while you sit on the tarmac waiting to take off! Well, concerns surrounding 5G and airport safety quickly quashed those dreams. 

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The other promise was capacity. The promise was “you can go to a concert and still stream to your friends back home” and yadda yadda. So far, in my experience, that has very much not been the case. Any time I find myself in an amusement park or a ballgame, my phone becomes a nice camera, as long as I don’t try to send photos to anyone. It’s been a while since I’ve run into that situation, so I wanted to take the temperature these days.

When the Cubs advanced to the Wild Card playoffs, I saw an opportunity. Cubs games are typically well-represented, but considering the last time they played in front of a home crowd in the playoffs was back in 2017, I wanted to see how these networks handled me hanging around with 41,000 of my closest friends. Packing three identical Pixel 10 Pros, I headed down for some fun at the old ballpark — from the outside because getting tickets was impossible.

The game plan

Since traffic around Wrigley Field (and anywhere within a three-mile radius) is perilous at the best of times, I headed over to Wrigley Field from 10 miles away (hi, mom) on my Engwe LE 20 electric bike — side note: I ride this bike more than my car during the summer months. 

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Fortunately (or unfortunately), I got a bit of a late start, so when the first pitch arrived at 2:08, I found myself about 4.8 miles away. That’s actually OK, because I wanted to get a baseline for the networks before I moved within range of the park. 

Once I was at the park, I was surprised at the lack of foot traffic outside the stadium. Granted, this was a day game, so there was less socializing outside the park. Beyond foot traffic, the biggest obstacles I anticipated that might impact connectivity were the stadium itself and all the people inside it trying to livestream or share videos of their views from the seats.

So at the corner of Lawrence and Pulaski, I ran my first tests.

Location 1: Lawrence and Pulaski

San Diego got off to a hot start with a Jackson Merrill sacrifice fly in the first inning to drive in Fernando Tatis Jr. The Cubs could not retaliate against Dylan Cease, so I was still 2.3 miles from Wrigley Field at the corner of Lincoln and Wilson when the second inning started.

Location 2: Lincoln and Wilson

By then, Andrew Kittredge had left the game, his role of “opener” finished, and Japanese star pitcher Shota Iminaga had entered as the actual starter for the game. For the record, I don’t like openers, but I’m also not a Major League manager, so I don’t get a vote. Nothing happened in the second inning, but by the beginning of the third inning, I’d arrived at the front gate of Wrigley Field for my first tests on site, and holy Toledo!

Location 3: Front gate

Those are no misplaced decimals — those are four-digit download speeds from both Verizon and AT&T. I’ll spare you the rest of the baseball recaps for here on out, but from here I moved to the right field gate.

Location 4: Right-field gate

At this gate, T-Mobile refused to run a speed test at all, failing to even connect to the server. That’s not great, but it would have a chance at redemption later in the game. Still, you can see the crowd may have been beginning to take a toll. On to the left field gate!

Location 5: Left-field gate

Fortunately. At the left field gate, there was a TV on in a bar that I could see from where I was standing. Also, this is where I ran my first download test. Using the same three phones, I downloaded the same 2GB file from my personal Google Drive. It was a 4K video file from a recent video project I shot. Here are the times, formatted in minutes and seconds.

From here, I decided I wanted to get one more baseline, so for the fifth inning, I headed over to the lakefront, which is just about a mile away from the park. 

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Being separated from the crowd, the networks behaved once again, even if the Padres did not — they scored another two runs.

Location 6: Lakefront

Once again, I headed back to the ballpark to see what the crowd had to say about those numbers. They did not agree. As I stood by the entrance to the bleachers, with the borderline creepy tribute to Harry Carey, I took another reading at the top of the 6th inning.

Location 7: Bleachers

Once again, T-Mobile was not participating, so I decided to head back to the right field entrance to see if it was just a Sheffield Avenue thing. It was not.

Location 8: Sheffield Avenue

Here lies our first mystery — well, second mystery, actually. The first mystery is how Eddie Vedder (yes, Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder) talked his way into singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” two days in a row. The second mystery is how T-Mobile decided not to play at all on my first visit to this spot, literally 30 minutes ago, and now it’s beating the pants off of its two competitors.

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Anyway, for my last test, I headed to Gallagher Way, which is a sort of entertainment spot for Cubs ticket holders outside of the park. Gallagher Way is also a popular spot for non-ticket holders due to the giant Jumbotron that broadcasts the games. That’s where I stayed for the last test, which took two innings for a particular reason I’ll get to in a moment. Here are the speed test results:

Location 9: Gallagher Way

I spent so much time at Gallagher Way because I also ran my second download speed test there, and AT&T decided it didn’t really feel like working on anything. I had to stop the download test after 12 minutes, during which it only completed about 75% of the download because by then, the game had ended, and we were all sad. 

More importantly, though, people were starting to flood out of the park, and I simply could not stay where I was.

After I left the park, I wanted to get one last baseline, so once I got to the corner of Lawrence and Clark, about 2.5 miles away, I ran one last speed test and one last download test. Here are the results:

Location 10: Lawrence and Clark

ZDNET’s key takeaways

Well, first of all, cellular networks are finicky things. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that will determine how fast your phone will be at any given time. One second, you get no signal. Next, you’re speeding through the fast lane. Is that because 39,000 other people all decided to put down their phones and sing a song together? Probably not.

The reality is, though, that network congestion absolutely can be a major factor in slowing down your phone. Every time I drifted away from the park, things got a lot better. So congestion is certainly a factor, but it’s definitely not the only factor.

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Of the three networks, Verizon had the fastest download speed at 2,666 Mbps, and it wasn’t even close. AT&T was the second fastest at the same location with 1,299 Mbps. T-Mobile’s speed topped out at 835 Mbps away from the park, but in the area around the park, it maxed out at 184 Mbps.

Interestingly enough, T-Mobile seemed to be the carrier most affected by the crowd — and that tracks with my own experience. Away from the park, the carrier managed speeds in the 300s, 400s, and even 800s, but once I got outside the park, that dropped to single or double digits. Speaking of which, here’s how often each carrier hit single, double, and triple digits:

Verizon never hit single digits and hit triple digits the most than any the carrier. Does that make Verizon the clear winner? That’s an arguable point. Well played, Verizon. 

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I contacted all three carriers, and I’ll update this article when/if they respond. Generally, it’s important to acknowledge that this is a small sample size. This is network performance in a confined area during a particular three-hour stretch, and it isn’t indicative of overall network performance. 

But it paints a picture, one that is consistent with my experience as a T-Mobile customer. Put simply, when a lot of people gather in one place — ball games, amusement parks, concerts — networks can struggle. That’s still a thing despite the promises of 5G that are almost seven years old. Maybe the Cubs will have better luck than the networks so far.