T-Mobile’s CTO, Neville Ray, announced yesterday that the team at T-Mobile has upgraded 100s of cell sites in the past few weeks, to increase mid-band capacity. Ray attached a short video to his Tweet announcing the upgrade, that shows the cities that have gotten upgrades in the past two weeks, and there’s plenty of them. It appears that most of these areas are suburbs, where T-Mobile has slightly slower service than in the city, so it’s definitely great to see this upgrade available.
For T-Mobile customers, this means that you’ll see faster speeds in these areas. By adding more capacity to its mid-band spectrum, customers will get faster speeds even with more and more connections being added to the network. And by adding capacity to its mid-band spectrum, T-Mobile is able to still cover plenty of area with its upgrades, while also adding more bandwidth. So it’s the best of both worlds. Surely T-Mobile could upgrade its 700MHz spectrum to do the same thing, but speeds would be slower, while covering a much larger area. But by upgrading its mid-band (the 1900MHz band), it is able to offer the best of bandwidth and coverage.
T-Mobile has not yet covered the entire US with capacity upgrades, but Ray does mention that “#WeWontStop” so it’s very likely that many more cell sites will be getting capacity upgrades in the coming weeks and months. Although it has upgraded a pretty significant portion of the US already. T-Mobile has been working hard on its network over the past few years, and has the fastest network, according to multiple studies – both individual companies and crowdsourced data. But that doesn’t mean T-Mobile is going to sit back and relax, like some other carriers have done in the past. It’s pushing forward with its LTE network and even getting ready to build its 5G network – which is going to be available in around 30 markets by the end of 2018. Ray and his team has been hard at work taking T-Mobile from the only network without LTE, to being the fastest LTE network in the US, in just a few short years.