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T-Mobile has aggressively focused this month on expanding their network capacity, first with their mid-band LTE upgrade, and just this week they announced that their low-band LTE also went through an update.
Neville Ray, CTO for T-Mobile, shared in a Tweet that "Our network team added low-band LTE to dozens of sites in just two weeks, which means more and better coverage."
The list of upgraded sites includes 53 major cities, across the continental United States, including San Francisco, CA; Miami, FL; Cincinnati, OH; and Baltimore, MD; with plans to expand Puerto Rico's coverage as well, later this year.
The reactions from T-Mobile users have been mixed, as it is believed that there are not very many devices currently in circulation that will significantly benefit from the upgrade. Only a few Samsung, LG, Motorola, and OnePlus phones are capable of using the new spectrum today, but 600MHz support should eventually become a standard feature in new phones. It will also take multiple years for T-Mobile to deploy the spectrum across the U.S. fully. T-Mobile currently offers six 600 MHz-capable smartphones, with still over a dozen more across all price points expected to launch this year.
All of the current and future planned network upgrades come short of a year after T-Mobile dropped $7.99 billion in a Federal Communications Commission auction for low-band wireless spectrum licenses. It is believed that T-Mobile now owns 45 percent of all available low-band spectrum which was purchased in the auction, enough to cover all of the U.S.
In a recent press release, the self-proclaimed "Un-carrier", reported that the would also begin enabling carrier aggregation for 600 MHz Extended Range LTE and mid-band LTE, so customers with capable devices can access the capacity of both at the same time, increasing download speeds, which means they have officially delivered on their promise.
Multiple industry analyst agrees that since John Legere took over as CEO in 2012, "the magenta provider" continues to make notable business decisions year after year, and 2018 is no exception. From massively upgrading their network to the most recent news involving T-Mobile's announcement that Sprint would be joining their family; however, the merger has yet to be approved by the FCC.
T-Mobile has not shared a specific timeline on future rollouts for planned upgrades; however, it is believed that the next major changes will occur in the way cell phone plan pricing is modeled which will significantly change once 5G is fully rolled out to the public.
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