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T-Mobile is Making a Big Crowd Sourced Coverage Map Push

T-Mobile's generally seen as having a weak wireless broadband coverage footprint, and the "uncarrier" is hoping to do something about that with a new crowdsourced coverage map. In a blog post, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray says the company has significantly reworked its data coverage maps to include data from outside firms and users themselves.

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"T-Mobile’s new Next-Gen Network Map reflects near real-time customer experiences on our network—based on more than 200 million actual customer usage data points every day," notes Ray. "On top of that − to validate and augment our own collected data − our new map also incorporates additional customer usage data from trusted third-party sources, including Inrix and others."

Neville proceeds to note that most carriers use "predictive coverage estimations" that wind up being horribly detached from real-world user experiences. Sprint in particularly over the last few years has faced significant criticism for coverage maps that veer toward the fantastical.

Zooming in on T-Mobile's new coverage map, users will now see "verified coverage" icon where an actual human being helped contribute data to the map. According to T-Mobile, this data -- culled from 200 million consumer data points daily -- is now updated twice monthly.

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Zenit_IIfx
The system is the solution
Premium Member
join:2012-05-07
Purcellville, VA
·Comcast XFINITY

5 recommendations

Zenit_IIfx

Premium Member

Great!

T-Mobile's network has improved drastically in the past 2 years, I cant believe how fast the transformation has been. 2 years ago the network was all EDGE the instant you went west of Leesburg in Northern Virginia. Now there is LTE all the way out to Winchester and then down I-81 (with some minor 2G gaps along Rt.7 over the Blue Ridge).

Everywhere I go regularly has LTE now...

The instant 700mhz is widely deployed their network will be even better, and that coverage map will look greater.