T-Mobile’s new coverage map uses crowdsourcing for near ‘real-time’ results

John Legere

T-Mobile is trying to once again shake things up in the mobile industry with the announcement of a new, real-time coverage map for prospective customers.

Boasting itself as “the industry’s first and only crowdsourced, customer-verified network coverage map”, T-Mobile is aiming to show new data bi-monthly to help you decide if it’s worth making the switch.

Neville Ray, chief technology officer at T-Mobile, said in a blog post on Monday the company is trying to change the way carriers have stubbornly held on to their old maps based on imperfect methods and dated technologies.

We hear all the time people complaining about T-Mobile’s coverage, even though they like the third-largest US carrier’s Uncarrier plans. It looks like T-Mobile wants to change that.

t-mobile-coverage-map

With T-Mobile’s new map, it will use more than 200 million actual customer usage data points every day, along with third-party data from “trusted” sourced like Inrix. The map will provide:

  • Customer-verified coverage based on actual customer usage, resulting in a vastly more transparent and accurate map, showing, for example, exactly where you can expect 4G LTE, 4G, 3G or other levels of coverage.
  • A Verified Coverage icon indicating where the majority of data is provided by T-Mobile customers reporting their actual network experience, providing an added layer of confidence.
  • Data that’s updated twice monthly − compared to data presented on the carriers’ maps, which is already dated by the time it’s printed and published and may be months or even years old.
  • Speed test data from trusted third party apps showing average download speeds from customer speed tests over the last 90 days.

What do you think of T-Mobile?

Source: T-Mobile via Blog Post