T-Mobile has just announced that they have LTE in 233 markets now, which means they have 205 million people covered. Which means, they’ve beaten their year-end goal of covering 200 million people and still have a couple of months left. With T-Mobile sitting at 233 LTE markets, with AT&T at over 400 markets and Verizon over 500 markets, that puts T-Mobile as catching up real fast. Especially since they only started putting out LTE this year. They quickly surpassed Sprint’s LTE network, and T-Mobile’s network is now considered a nationwide LTE network. T-Mobile is also covering 91 of the 100 major markets already. That’s something that Sprint has really struggled with, and in places that Sprint has LTE, their speeds really aren’t that fast, they look more like AT&T’s HSPA+ network speeds.
Right now T-Mobile’s LTE speeds are around 20-30mbps, depending on where you are of course. Which is a good speeds. Most places with Verizon you’ll find maybe a max of 10mbps. Which is because they don’t have the capacity. Another reason I like T-Mobile’s network is they have their HSPA+ 42mbps network to back up the LTE, which is as fast as Verizon’s LTE. AT&T’s LTE speeds are in a league of their own though.
Legere was citing a recent study by Speedtest.net, that they just narrowly missed beating AT&T for the fastest network in the country. It actually topped out AT&T in 10 of the top 20 markets. While Verizon and AT&T are still claiming to be the most reliable networks. Although I have my own personal opinion about that, which I’ll leave for Google+.
It’s still great to see T-Mobile moving LTE into markets so quickly. Especially since before CES this year they had zero LTE markets. Like I said before, another thing T-Mobile has going for it is the backbone to their LTE network, which is their HSPA+ 42. AT&T has HSPA+ 21, which is about half as fast as you probably figured out. While Sprint and Verizon just have 3G. Who want’s that? So good job T-Mobile and keep it up.