T-Mobile USA is using a holiday commercial to highlight the improvements it has made to its network to enhance its network speed, a new part of an ongoing effort to promote its HSPA+ service ahead of its launch of LTE next year.
The commercial features spokeswoman Carly Foulkes riding a black and magenta motorcycle through a cityscape, as many recent T-Mobile advertisements have. "At T-Mobile, we've all worked together to give our customers an amazing string of holidays presents," the narrator of the commercial intones. "We've doubled the speed of our network not once, not twice, but three times. And we're far from done yet."
The ad notes in fine print that the three speed increases have come since 2009. T-Mobile has upgraded its network first to HSPA+21 and then later to even faster HSPA+42 technology. The carrier has also been refarming its 1900 MHz PCS spectrum to deliver faster HSPA+ service on spectrum that was primarily reserved for GSM service. T-Mobile now has 100 million POPs covered with HSPA+ on 1900 MHz, and has said 170 million will be covered by mid-2013 and 200 million covered by the end of 2013.
T-Mobile's HSPA+42 network covers 184 million POPs and its HSPA+ 21 network covers more than 220 million POPs. The company plans to deploy LTE service on its 1700 MHz AWS spectrum next year and plans to cover more than 100 million POPs with LTE by mid-year and 200 million POPs by the end of 2013.
Among the six largest U.S. carriers, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) remains the carrier providing the fastest--and most consistently speedy--mobile data network, thanks in large part to its extensive LTE network, according to a September report from wireless testing company RootMetrics.
The report found that Verizon's data network (combined LTE and CDMA EV-DO) on average supported downlink speeds of 13 Mbps and uplink speeds of 7 Mbps. AT&T Mobility's (NYSE:T) network (HSPA+21 and LTE) produced average downlink speeds of 7 Mbps, while T-Mobile USA's HSPA+ 42 network helped it keep pace with AT&T, producing average downlink speeds of a little more than 5 Mbps.
Of course, T-Mobile has not been the only carrier increasing network speeds. Verizon, AT&T and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) have all deployed LTE technology and are continuing to expand their networks.
For more:
- see this TMoNews article
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