Neville Ray, chief technology officer of T-Mobile, has revealed the telecom operator’s main achievements in 2016.
T-Mobile CTO also used the opportunity to flay rivals AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.
Neville Ray revealed that T-Mobile’s LTE network now covers 313 million people against Verizon’s 314 million.
T-Mobile Extended Range LTE — which works 4x better in buildings and goes 2x farther from the tower — covers over 250 million people in more than 500 metro areas.
Neville Ray said Verizon’s LTE network is not Advanced.
Verizon was beginning its rollout of a carrier aggregation technology that T-Mobile customers had been enjoying since 2014. At the time of Big Red’s launch, T-Mobile customers were already reaping the benefits of LTE Advanced technology – and now it’s in more than 500 markets.
Though Verizon’s Advanced network was touted as 50 percent faster than before, it is slower than T-Mobile in the most recent speed tests.
In addition to the most advanced LTE network, T-Mobile customers are already enjoying seven LTE Advanced technologies including VoLTE with eSRVCC, Carrier Aggregation, CoMP, SON, HetNets, EVS and higher order modulation.
T-Mobile customers now lead customers of all wireless providers worldwide in their use of VoLTE—with 64 percent of all customer calls made over VoLTE each and every day.
T-Mobile was the first operator in the US to launch 4×4 MIMO and 256 and 64 QAM in 2016.
While Verizon is talking about 1 Gbps on 5G, T-Mobile reached nearly 1 Gbps (979 Mbps) on its LTE network in lab thanks to a combination of three carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM (and an un-released handset).
Neville Ray says T-Mobile will be first to offer Gigabit speeds.
All networks are created more or less equal—give or take only 1 percent difference. Sprint’s ad line, “Why pay twice as much for only 1 percent difference?” is catchy. “Sadly, it’s also pure tosh. You’re getting half the network for an advertised half-priced buy,” said Neville Ray.
Sprint’s data experts extracted that “1 percent difference” from select markets in a Nielsen drive test, creating a set of results allowing them to claim a 1 percent difference in the availability of any signal whatsoever — with zero distinction between 2G, 3G or 4G, nor the performance of that signal.
Sprint’s customers have less coverage—with no LTE signal nearly 25 percent of the time. Their customers endure an LTE network slower than any other—nearly 40 percent slower than T-Mobile on download and 60 percent slower on upload. And their customers still can’t use voice and data simultaneously.
Sprint says they’ll fix their network with software and new handset technology called HPUE. They will take long time.
Neville Ray says 5G’s potential is larger than replacing in-home broadband and IoT. AT&T wants to connect your world – including your bank account – to AT&T. Verizon’s vision is that you Netflix at home with wireless Verizon broadband. How is that game changing?
Neville Ray sees 5G transforming the mobile Internet and delivering brilliant breakthroughs. Mobile VR, AR, AI and more will be made better and available on-the-go because of 5G.
T-Mobile says it has already demonstrated mobile speeds of 1.8 Gbps, fixed speeds of 12 Gbps with latency under 2 milliseconds, 8×8 MIMO and four simultaneous 4k video streams.
