Substantial portion of current EDGE coverage to make jump straight to LTE by mid-2015
No matter what T-Mobile does, it seems like its biggest issue is the stigma surrounding its network quality and coverage. The nation’s fourth-place carrier is working to repair that reputation today with big announcements about its network coverage. This week marks one year since T-Mobile started its nationwide LTE network rollout, and it’s hard to deny that it’s made strides in getting that new network out to a huge number of people in just 12 months. In terms of numbers, T-Mobile claims 210 million people across 273 metro areas are now covered by LTE. But it isn’t stopping there.
While this is a big milestone, T-Mobile is now committing to upgrading its EDGE (that’s 2G) network to LTE as quickly as possible. By the end of 2014, the carrier will have a full 50 percent of its EDGE network upgraded to LTE, with the entire upgrade being “substantially complete” by the middle of 2015. That’s right, folks will be making the jump straight from EDGE coverage to LTE throughout 2014 and 2015. Part of this upgrade comes along with deploying LTE on the newly-acquired 700MHz A-Block spectrum it acquired from Verizon. Now this is the right way to gain customers.
T-Mobile has been relying on its claims of having the “fastest” nationwide network for some time now based on independent testing, and if these claims of LTE expansion end up being true it very well could be a no-compromise coverage situation as well. Taking a swing back at Verizon, which regularly takes low-blows at the other carriers for their LTE coverage, T-Mobile is even releasing a new TV ad (below) and taking legal action to have Verizon stop its defamatory network coverage ads.
Things are certainly heating up. Let’s see if T-Mobile can meet its promises like it did with the initial LTE expansion.
Source: T-Mobile