For a long time, T-Mobile’s biggest “pain point” has been the quality of its wireless network, but that may be changing much more quickly than any of us expected. Re/code’s Walt Mossberg recently took T-Mobile up on its offer to try out its network for free for one week and he found that Big Magenta’s LTE network actually performed better in Verizon’s did.
“T-Mobile beat Verizon overall, in each location,” Mossberg reports. “T-Mobile averaged just over 10 megabits per second downstream, versus 6.8 Mbps for Verizon. In D.C., T-Mobile averaged 11.4 Mbps down, much faster than Verizon’s 7.6 Mbps. In San Francisco, T-Mobile averaged 8.7 Mbps down, versus just about 6 Mbps for Verizon.”
This isn’t the only report we’ve seen of T-Mobile’s network making huge strides in a relatively short time. PCMag last month found that T-Mobile had blown past AT&T to become America’s second-fastest LTE network behind Verizon. And earlier this year, OpenSignal’s crowd-sourced data found that T-Mobile had actually become the fastest LTE network in the entire country.
There is still plenty of work for T-Mobile to do, however, despite its recent improvements. The biggest issue is that it still isn’t delivering very strong coverage outside of major metropolitan areas, which is where Verizon and AT&T both excel. Having the fastest LTE network is great, but T-Mobile now needs to make sure that people can get access to it wherever they go.
