In previous years, the race for the fastest mobile network was won by a rather comfortable margin. This 2017, the story is slightly different as the race is the tightest ever.

The over-all winner and this year's fastest mobile network is Verizon, according to PCMag. This is the eighth year that PCMag conducted the contest. It came up to the conclusion that Verizon is the fastest network by simply going around 30 cities across the United States in May and running speed tests in each location. The website used a number of Samsung Galaxy S8 phones to run Ookla's Speedtest.net software and measure the speed of each network in each city.

The process of coming up with what they called a Speed Score involved gathering over 124,000 data points and analyzing "balanced downloads, uploads, latency, and reliability," as PCMag reported. Despite Verizon having the best over-all Speed Score, the other mobile networks did not fare so bad. In fact, all the other networks had a chance to take home the bacon due to their improved performance from the previous year.

Verizon and T-Mobile were the two fastest mobile networks in another study done this time by SpeedSmart. The company arrived at that conclusion after gathering speedtest data crowdsourced from an app that is used to analyze speeds in different areas in the country. BGR reported that SpeedSmart studied the speedtest results of 40 cities in May this year. Out of a possible 80 speed tests, Verizon and T-Mobile combined for 52 first and second place finishes.

AT&T followed the two mobile networks while Sprint remained the slowest of the bunch. It must be noted, however, that each mobile network had its share of having a strong performance in certain cities. AT&T, for example, fared well in Indianapolis but was weak in New York City. T-Mobile performed differently as it was weak in NYC but strong in Indianapolis.