T-Mobile’s CTO, Neville Ray, took to Twitter on Friday to announce that the Un-carrier has just lit up hundreds of new cell sites with mid-band LTE upgrades. What this means, essentially, is that the network will be able to handle more congestion, without slowing down speeds. Most users won’t see much change in the speed of T-Mobile’s network (unless they are in a very saturated T-Mobile area), but when things get busy, speeds won’t decrease, which is a good thing. T-Mobile lists hundreds of cities in Ray’s tweet, which include cities like Tempe, AZ; Carlsbad, CA; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; Long Island City, NY; Layton, UT and many others.
These mid-band LTE upgrades are still pretty important for T-Mobile, especially as the carrier continues to add more and more customers to its network. As more customers will add more connections and can really slow down its network. But by adding more capacity to its existing network, T-Mobile will be able to keep its network somewhat fast and efficient, which is a good thing. Especially since T-Mobile does already claim that it has the fastest network in the country, it is now looking to remain the fastest.
For customers, there’s nothing that needs to be done on their end. This isn’t new spectrum, like the 600MHz spectrum is, so your existing phone will work just fine. Many users may not even really notice a difference with the network, unless as we stated already, they are in a pretty saturated area. These capacity upgrades mean that T-Mobile’s network will continue to get faster and faster. Now while it doesn’t improve its coverage, it does improve speed and capacity in existing areas, which is still important to T-Mobile. Now Ray did not mention anything about 600MHz spectrum in his tweet, but rest assured that he and his team are working hard to get 600MHz rolled out as quickly as they can.