T-Mobile may be making a lot of noise with promotions, but the carrier also continues to improve its network.
In a blot post on the company’s website, CTO Neville Ray gave a year-end update on where the Un-Carrier is with its network improvements.
Ray said T-Mobile has more than doubled its LTE footprint over the past year. The company not covers 304 million Americans and over 1 million square miles.
“We’ve brought LTE to 219 new markets, and we’re looking forward to expanding our distribution to make T-Mobile available to many more Americans,” Ray wrote.
Over the coming year, T-Mobile will focuses on continuing to extend LTE into the suburbs and rural areas. Ray said the company will also be working to increase speed and capacity by leveraging new technologies like 4×4 MIMO and 3-band carrier aggregation.
On the regulatory front, Ray said T-Mobile would continue to participate aggressively in the upcoming broadcast spectrum auction, while continuing to champion more innovation with LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U).
“And yes, when 5G is ready, you bet T-Mobile will be ready to deliver the benefits to our customers. But don’t be too distracted by certain carriers teasing premature promises of 5G today,” Ray wrote. “The industry standards don’t even exist for 5G yet, but if you look at what T-Mobile has being doing to give customers an advanced LTE experience (a prerequisite to 5G), you’ll see that we fully intend to bring 5G to the market in a very real way when the time comes.”