T-Mobile says it’s ready to compete not just on speed, but breadth of coverage too.
T-Mobile has its sights set on Verizon Wireless.
The nation’s third-largest carrier believes it will be able to match Verizon’s industry-leading wireless coverage within the next 12 months, and maybe sooner, according to T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray.
“We plan to materially close the gap by the end of the year,” Ray said in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Ray and T-Mobile have reason to be bullish. Testing firms OpenSignal and Ookla both crowned T-Mobile the fastest wireless network, and OpenSignal said T-Mobile has surpassed AT&T on network availability, just behind Verizon. T-Mobile CEO John Legere on Thursday published a blog post highlighting the scores, essentially taking a victory lap.
Armed with the test results, T-Mobile said it will start to talk more loudly about breadth of coverage. The new approach marks a departure from its emphasis on speed. The knock on T-Mobile has been that while it may boast high speeds, its network was only good in the big cities. Go further out, and your bars would quickly drop.
T-Mobile no longer believes that’s the case. The company said it covers 311 million people with its LTE network. That’s a measure of how many people can theoretically get the service, not actual subscribers. T-Mobile said that’s just a few million away from Verizon, but that still represents a large swath of sparsely populated land.
Verizon dismissed Ray’s comments, and touted its capital investment in its network.
“Talk is cheap, and it won’t make the nearly 1 million-square-mile gap in LTE coverage — or the stark advantage in reliability and consistent speeds that VZ’s network has over TMobile — disappear,” said a spokesman.
Spectrum play
T-Mobile is also banking on its participation in the ongoing government auction of spectrum to help boost its coverage. At stake is low-band 600-megahertz spectrum that’s ideal for going large distances and punching through walls.
Despite the auction process still getting going, T-Mobile’s Ray vowed it will be the first carrier to make use of that spectrum. The company is preparing its network now to use the new spectrum as soon as late 2017.
AT&T and Verizon are also participating in the auction.
Even without the spectrum, Ray believes he has a network that’s on par with the competition.
“There are no trade-offs today,” he said.
Source: cnet.com
I will believe T-Mobile when I see it happen in my own back yard. My son and his wife have T-Mobile because it is cheaper, but my house is about 40 miles northwest of Tallahassee, FL in Southwest GA. They do not have coverage here when they come to visit and probably won’t for some time as there are not a lot of people in our market compared to Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Panama City or Pensacola. At the moment, they only have coverage on the interstates in the south GA area, I 75, I 95, till you get past Tifton on I 75. The biggest issue wireless carriers run into is transport cost and facilities between the cell sites and the switching center. Most cell sites, with today’s current technology, requires some type of fiber optic connection. There are very few local telco companies that have spare fiber in their current infrastructure to provide those needed connections without having to lay more fiber, which can take a year or more, depending on distance to the closest wire-line central office. I know the issues I ran into back in ’91 as an operations manager for a Cellular One affiliate in my home town market. This was back in the old analog/TDMA digital age and cell sites could be connected to the switching network with just a couple of T-1s. At the current time, there are only two carriers in my home town, Verizon and AT&T. AT&T came late to the game when they inherited the Alltel wireless infrastructure and Verizon got the customers when Alltel got out of wireless in South GA. As of 2013, AT&T had very spotty coverage even in my home town with GSM and 3G. It has improved over the past year or two, but not by much. The biggest hurdle to overcome in my hometown market is the southern part of the market, long the GA-FL line is very hilly, with as much as a 250 foot variation in terrain in a lot of places. All I can say is that they better hope that they can get a chunk of that 600-700 MHz channel block to install sites in challenging terrain areas like ours because anything above 450 MHz has very little penetration power in the heavy foliage prevalent in our area. There are still a lot of areas in our 9 county market that cell phones don’t work, even for Verizon customers.
There are still places where T-Mobile doesn’t provide great coverage – I’m hitting the Oregon Coast soon and expect to have trouble.
Still, at a fraction of the price, with fairer treatment and outstanding service, and coverage at the places I am 99% of the time, I can’t imagine going to Verizon.
T-Mobile really does a lot for its customers. That’s loyalty from the Carrier’s End and more on that LTE service is amazing
I will believe T-Mobile when I see it happen in my own back yard. My son and his wife have T-Mobile because it is cheaper, but my house is about 40 miles northwest of Tallahassee, FL in Southwest GA. They do not have coverage here when they come to visit and probably won’t for some time as there are not a lot of people in our market compared to Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Panama City or Pensacola. At the moment, they only have coverage on the interstates in the south GA area, I 75, I 95, till you get past Tifton on I 75. The biggest issue wireless carriers run into is transport cost and facilities between the cell sites and the switching center. Most cell sites, with today’s current technology, requires some type of fiber optic connection. There are very few local telco companies that have spare fiber in their current infrastructure to provide those needed connections without having to lay more fiber, which can take a year or more, depending on distance to the closest wire-line central office. I know the issues I ran into back in ’91 as an operations manager for a Cellular One affiliate in my home town market. This was back in the old analog/TDMA digital age and cell sites could be connected to the switching network with just a couple of T-1s. At the current time, there are only two carriers in my home town, Verizon and AT&T. AT&T came late to the game when they inherited the Alltel wireless infrastructure and Verizon got the customers when Alltel got out of wireless in South GA. As of 2013, AT&T had very spotty coverage even in my home town with GSM and 3G. It has improved over the past year or two, but not by much. The biggest hurdle to overcome in my hometown market is the southern part of the market, long the GA-FL line is very hilly, with as much as a 250 foot variation in terrain in a lot of places. All I can say is that they better hope that they can get a chunk of that 600-700 MHz channel block to install sites in challenging terrain areas like ours because anything above 450 MHz has very little penetration power in the heavy foliage prevalent in our area. There are still a lot of areas in our 9 county market that cell phones don’t work, even for Verizon customers.
There are still places where T-Mobile doesn’t provide great coverage – I’m hitting the Oregon Coast soon and expect to have trouble.
Still, at a fraction of the price, with fairer treatment and outstanding service, and coverage at the places I am 99% of the time, I can’t imagine going to Verizon.
@E B Good luck with that. When I had T-mobile, I just put my phone in my glovebox on the Oregon coast. It’s basically just an expensive lump of plastic out there. There’s pretty much ZERO coverage for T-mobile.
@KingRockabilly @E B Not sure when you went, but I went a few months ago and had LTE. It certainly had some degraded spots, but I had decent coverage most of the time. At one point I was roaming, so I am not sure but they may of partnered with someone up there.
Been pleasantly surprised around Newport – solid signal, very fast LTE. So far, so good. Used to be from just north of here up through Lincoln City was a dead zone…I’ll see later this weekend.
T-Mobile really does a lot for its customers. That’s loyalty from the Carrier’s End and more on that LTE service is amazing
I will believe T-Mobile when I see it happen in my own back yard. My son and his wife have T-Mobile because it is cheaper, but my house is about 40 miles northwest of Tallahassee, FL in Southwest GA. They do not have coverage here when they come to visit and probably won’t for some time as there are not a lot of people in our market compared to Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Panama City or Pensacola. At the moment, they only have coverage on the interstates in the south GA area, I 75, I 95, till you get past Tifton on I 75. The biggest issue wireless carriers run into is transport cost and facilities between the cell sites and the switching center. Most cell sites, with today’s current technology, requires some type of fiber optic connection. There are very few local telco companies that have spare fiber in their current infrastructure to provide those needed connections without having to lay more fiber, which can take a year or more, depending on distance to the closest wire-line central office. I know the issues I ran into back in ’91 as an operations manager for a Cellular One affiliate in my home town market. This was back in the old analog/TDMA digital age and cell sites could be connected to the switching network with just a couple of T-1s. At the current time, there are only two carriers in my home town, Verizon and AT&T. AT&T came late to the game when they inherited the Alltel wireless infrastructure and Verizon got the customers when Alltel got out of wireless in South GA. As of 2013, AT&T had very spotty coverage even in my home town with GSM and 3G. It has improved over the past year or two, but not by much. The biggest hurdle to overcome in my hometown market is the southern part of the market, long the GA-FL line is very hilly, with as much as a 250 foot variation in terrain in a lot of places. All I can say is that they better hope that they can get a chunk of that 600-700 MHz channel block to install sites in challenging terrain areas like ours because anything above 450 MHz has very little penetration power in the heavy foliage prevalent in our area. There are still a lot of areas in our 9 county market that cell phones don’t work, even for Verizon customers.
There are still places where T-Mobile doesn’t provide great coverage – I’m hitting the Oregon Coast soon and expect to have trouble.
Still, at a fraction of the price, with fairer treatment and outstanding service, and coverage at the places I am 99% of the time, I can’t imagine going to Verizon.
@E B Good luck with that. When I had T-mobile, I just put my phone in my glovebox on the Oregon coast. It’s basically just an expensive lump of plastic out there. There’s pretty much ZERO coverage for T-mobile.
@KingRockabilly @E B Not sure when you went, but I went a few months ago and had LTE. It certainly had some degraded spots, but I had decent coverage most of the time. At one point I was roaming, so I am not sure but they may of partnered with someone up there.
Been pleasantly surprised around Newport – solid signal, very fast LTE. So far, so good. Used to be from just north of here up through Lincoln City was a dead zone…I’ll see later this weekend.
T-Mobile really does a lot for its customers. That’s loyalty from the Carrier’s End and more on that LTE service is amazing