Shortly after Christmas, Verizon Wireless started airing a new commercial on TV. They used balls to show how their network was better than the competition and citing RootMetric’s findings in their “latest” reports. However their “latest” reports were over a year ago, and in fact, RootMetrics had two new reports since then (for the first half of 2015 and the second half of 2015). Last week, Verizon decided to call them out on that and released a short video showing the problems with that commercial. Now over the weekend, T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere, unleashed a new commercial, with balls. And it shows how much LTE coverage Verizon added in the past year versus T-Mobile. Now to be fair here, Verizon had an aggressive roll out of 4G LTE well before T-Mobile. So that number there is a bit skewed in favor of T-Mobile, but it is still true.
It’s a pretty quick commercial showing that T-Mobile’s network has indeed gotten much better in the past year, and even the past few years. T-Mobile says that while Verizon covers 308 million customers with LTE, they cover 304 million customers with LTE. Almost the same footprint as Verizon. But not quite. T-Mobile is also touting their band 12 coverage, which gives users four times better coverage in buildings, which is still pretty important. Because when you’re at work, you still want to be able to use your phone, right?
Legere really wants the public to know that while Verizon’s network still does cover more American’s with LTE, they are catching up and catching up fast. Something that most people didn’t think was possible when Legere took over T-Mobile in late 2012. But in just over 3 years, he’s definitely turned the company around, and now Sprint is the one with the major issues. T-Mobile is still hoping to pick up some decent licenses from the 600MHz spectrum auction that’s slated for later this quarter. That spectrum auction is going to be pretty important for T-Mobile. As they have the least bit of sub-1GHz spectrum, which is needed for decent in-building coverage as well as more coverage with less cell towers.