T-Mobile’s CTO, Neville Ray, announced on Twitter over the weekend that its network team has been working hard recently, and have rolled out low-band LTE in 100s of cities across the country. While Ray did not specify whether this was 600MHz or 700MHz spectrum, but T-Mobile did note that it was a mixture of both spectrums. What this means for customers is that there will be more coverage, and better speeds on the magenta LTE network now.
There are many States that got new low-band LTE coverage in the “last two weeks” according to Ray. Which includes cities in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, DC, Idaho, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Viriginia. That’s clearly not all 50 US States, but a good majority of them. So this shows that T-Mobile has been working hard to bring LTE to more areas in the country. And not just more LTE, but more capacity and better coverage. Which is something that does still plague T-Mobile, even though it does tout that it has the fastest LTE network in the US right now.
This is part of T-Mobile’s rollout for 5G actually, as a faster LTE network is going to make 5G even stronger for T-Mobile. Now the company did note at Mobile World Congress, that it was planning to roll out both 4G LTE and 5G over 600MHz spectrum at the same time. It’s unclear whether T-Mobile has done that with the 600MHz sites it has already lit up, but it is very possible. Seeing as T-Mobile isn’t planning to completely light up these 5G sites until later this year – and even then it’ll only be available in about 30 cities. Not to mention the fact that there are no 5G-compatible devices on the market right now. But this is a good look for those that have been complaining about T-Mobile’s coverage being subpar. Those that live in these cities that are getting more low-band LTE should notice a pretty big difference in LTE coverage.