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T-Mobile's 'Ultra Capacity' 5G Now Covers 200 Million People

827538 said:
If they can deliver this sort of coverage everywhere then I’ll be very happy.
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Spoiler alert: they can't. :p

We just switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, and while the 5G "UC" is very cool (see below), in my suburban city there are still dead spots, slow-speed areas, and I get the occasional dropped call at home. As post-paid carriers go, I like them fine, but they are far from perfect.

ronm99 said:
I live in a suburban area outside of Portland, and I’ve regularly been getting 750Mb/s speeds which blows my mind. I have Comcast GB service, and my phone only gets about 700Mb/s at home standing 3 feet from an Eero WiFi 6 router that is connected to my modem via ethernet. It kind of blows my mind that my cellular connection is superior to my very expensive home WiFi setup.
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Have not seen 750 on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, but I get 400+ at a few places, and that is still higher than my cable internet at home. It's definitely not everywhere, but it's awesome when I find it.

boss.king said:
Genuine question — is anyone using 5G to do something that they specifically couldn’t do with 4G/LTE? Not like downloading by a file in half the time, but things that you genuinely couldn’t reasonably do before?
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I mainly use 5G to see the biggest numbers I've ever seen on the Speedtest app. :D
Other than that - solid, reliable LTE would be fine for pretty much everything I use a mobile for.
 
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jayducharme said:
I'm confused. The US supposedly has about 350 million people. How can T-Mobile have 308 million customers? Or is that just worded strangely? The article goes on to say that in actuality T-Mobile has closer to 100 million customers.
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The US actually has about 331 million according to the 2020 census. T-Mobile couldn't actually have 308 million customers, but according to the article, "this is a theoretical maximum based on the coverage that T-Mobile offers" and even narrowing it down to actual non-fictitious people, "not all... will be able to access the 5G speeds due to location or device limitations"
 
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I feel benchmarks are useless - I use fast, and t-mobile's 5G UC is a lot less stable than 4G. The latency seems much higher, and there are a lot more dead spots, and for normal usage (web browsing), I've never really felt any benefit and improvement of speed of 5G vs 4G.
 
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I still get crappy performance on UC in some areas. I think the back hauls are not up for it on some towers.

In other areas, it’s fantastic.
 
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In the Dallas ( TX ) area, been consistently getting 550+ down / 60-70 up during the day and 725+ down / 60-90 up in the evenings and night ( got around 970 something down once )
 
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jayducharme said:
I'm confused. The US supposedly has about 350 million people. How can T-Mobile have 308 million customers? Or is that just worded strangely? The article goes on to say that in actuality T-Mobile has closer to 100 million customers.
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It’s confusing because they are presenting the denominator before the numerator. They are claiming their coverage reaches 308 million people, and of that group just under a third have T Mobile. Although, that’s also not exactly true as some people might have them but not be within an area they service.

The metric of reaching is dubious however because it’s typically based either on where they have a license to deploy spectrum or an idealized map of coverage based on what they have rolled out. So even if your city is covered geography your neighborhood might mean you don’t have service.
 
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jayducharme said:
I'm confused. The US supposedly has about 350 million people. How can T-Mobile have 308 million customers? Or is that just worded strangely? The article goes on to say that in actuality T-Mobile has closer to 100 million customers.
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Macrumors didn’t do their homework or misread the press release. T-Mobile says
… This is all on top of T-Mobile’s Extended Range 5G, which covers 308 million people across 1.7 million square miles.
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So this number is essentially the population of their covered regions, which translates to 308 million current+potential customers.
 
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How many of the 200m covered will be impacted by the next T-Mobile data breech. ??
 
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I have actually been a TMo customer for 20 years now and I have always had great service even when I travelled extensively mostly by car but occasionally by plane as well. The only place I always had spotty coverage was central Illinois along I-70. My area around KC has extensive 5GUC and I typically get 500gbps or faster downloads. I am also on their home internet 5G service and I am amazed that we can have 6-8 devices connected and still stream HD or better content with zero lag. My son games extensively on 2 systems and he rarely experiences any issues.
 
827538 said:
Mint Mobile. It’s what I use. $20/m for 10GB.
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Is that truly a flat $20 bill you get each month from them, or is that $20 before "taxes and surcharges"?

Just curious because I considered Mint Mobile at one time, back when I was on a post-paid T-Mobile plan. I eventually just switched to T-Mobile's "Connect" pre-paid plan. It says it costs $25/month for the one I've got, but I'm really billed about $27.10 a month after taxes are added on. Considering it gives me 5.5GB of data per month, it sounds like Mint really is the better value. But I wondered how coverage and service was with them. I think the "Connect" plan essentially gives you identical service to a post-paid T-Mobile customer, which in theory is better than the third party carriers who tend to get throttled or bumped off of full towers with their contracted partners.
 
I feel like we've reached the point where internet speed is in the dismissing-returns zone. Yeah, I suppose for those of us who download massive files all day, every day, there will always be a need for more... but the common man? I think we reached that peak awhile ago. Now, it just feels like marketing.
 
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kingtj1971 said:
Is that truly a flat $20 bill you get each month from them, or is that $20 before "taxes and surcharges"?

Just curious because I considered Mint Mobile at one time, back when I was on a post-paid T-Mobile plan. I eventually just switched to T-Mobile's "Connect" pre-paid plan. It says it costs $25/month for the one I've got, but I'm really billed about $27.10 a month after taxes are added on. Considering it gives me 5.5GB of data per month, it sounds like Mint really is the better value. But I wondered how coverage and service was with them. I think the "Connect" plan essentially gives you identical service to a post-paid T-Mobile customer, which in theory is better than the third party carriers who tend to get throttled or bumped off of full towers with their contracted partners.
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I think that's before taxes, but there are no other charges. I'm on the 15/mo option, I pay (I think) 180ish USD/year upfront. I can call internationally, I can text anyone, and I get 4GB of data (way more than I'm using right now while working from home).

I live in PA and the reception isn't always 100% perfect, but it basically always works when I need it. I can't think of anything I'd want to pay more for.
 
lyngo said:
How many of the 200m covered will be impacted by the next T-Mobile data breech. 😳😀
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That was so very bad. We will have Identity Theft Insurance/Protection for the rest of our lives because of that. But we are still on T-Mobile, moving to another service wouldn’t change anything. And similar data breaches are not uncommon.
 
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