T-Mobile's tight second-place finish in our 2017 Fastest Mobile Networks test caps several years of incredible network growth for the No. 3 US carrier.
For the past seven years, we've been driving around the US testing 3G and 4G wireless networks, collecting speed data and tracking coverage during our drives. We can only test the areas our drivers cover, but that still gives us a decent picture of how the networks are growing.
And T-Mobile has grown a lot.
"We've been looking to match the national footprint of a Verizon, who have been No. 1 on overall coverage in the US, and we're pretty much there now. That's been a big part of our journey," Neville Ray, T-Mobile's CTO, told PCMag.
The company provided us with maps showing what it says are four years of growth for its LTE coverage, based on data from the end of each year. We assembled them into a GIF:
We also added maps from our own drive tests in May of each year, which we've never revealed before. Red is 2G, yellow is 3G, and green is 4G LTE.
T-Mobile's LTE coverage was pretty bad in 2014. As you can see in our drive-test map, it mainly covered only city centers on the East Coast. In 2015, parts of the Central US started to fill in, but you couldn't really call it a nationwide network.
The big change happened between mid-2015 and mid-2016 when T-Mobile started building its "extended range" 700MHz network. Yes, there were still noticable gaps in T-Mobile's network; West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania had very little T-Mobile coverage at all. That's backed up on T-Mobile's official maps, but by and large, there's more green than red on our map, and more pink than black on T-Mobile's.
"That's primarily 700MHz," Ray said. "We were hugely excited to get our hands on the 700MHz and we moved at breathtaking speed to deploy it. You can see the fruit of the labor after two, two and a half years of work on rapid deployment. A lot of that rural footprint for us was either roaming or 2G, and in some cases we didn't even have footprint [before the 700MHz rollout]," he said.
Now take a look at 2017. T-Mobile is truly a nationwide 4G network. The final big gaps we ran into were in Wyoming and southern Arizona. The company says it's filling in the Arizona gap, and Wyoming doesn't have very many people in it.
"Our goal set for 2017, what we're targeting, is to get north of 320 million [people covered]," Ray said. "There's material geographic expansion there."
It's tough to shake off a bad reputation. T-Mobile was kneecapped by the failed AT&T merger bid in 2011, which left it a few years behind Verizon and AT&T in setting up a nationwide LTE network.
But our studies show that you don't need to worry about that any more, unless you're in Wyoming or a few other rural areas. T-Mobile's coverage will expand further in the West as it lays down a rural and suburban network on its new 600MHz spectrum over the next two years.
"We've got about 270 million [people covered] on our 700MHz network. We own licenses for about 272. When we end that story, we're picking up straightaway on the 600MHz story," Ray said. "We've got radio coming in the third quarter we we can start standing up test clusters, and deployment moves into full-bore mode for us in Q4."
Warning: Merge Ahead?
There's one warning I see in this history, though. As I said, T-Mobile's network was hobbled in part by the drama around its failed merger with AT&T, and revitalized in part thanks to the massive breakup fee AT&T paid the company when the merger didn't pan out.
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Now rumors are rising again of Sprint and T-Mobile potentially merging. Huge mergers like this aren't just bad for competition and prices. They direct a company's energy inwards for years, as it struggles with merging workforces, eliminating duplicate stores, and combining cell sites. That generally makes service improvement grind to a halt in favor of increasing profit through efficiency. We saw this with Sprint and Nextel, and we saw it with AT&T and Cingular.
T-Mobile's done an amazing job of building its network in the past few years. With 5G coming up just two years from now, it can't afford to vanish into a navel-gazing, merger-related rabbit hole. Hopefully, it'll stay independent and be as competitive in 5G as it has become in 4G LTE.