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T-Mobile Won't Stop Claiming Its Network Is Faster Than Verizon's (theverge.com)
T-Mobile says it will continue to claim it has the country's fastest LTE network even after the National Advertising Division, a telecom industry watchdog group, "recommended" that it stop doing so in print, TV, and web advertisements. In a statement given to Ars Technica, "NAD previously recognized third-party crowdsourced data as a way to look at network performance, so we looked at the latest results, and verified what we already knew. T-Mobile is still the fastest LTE network and we'll continue to let consumers know that." The Verge reports: The dispute arose earlier this year as part of a T-Mobile ad campaign that insinuated that Verizon's network was older and slower, and that its service did not feature unlimited plans. Verizon then filed a complaint with the NAD, which is a self-regulatory body of the telecom industry designed to settle disputes, avoid litigation, and protect against unwanted government regulation. Verizon said at the time that because T-Mobile was relying on crowdsourced data from third-party speed test providers Ookla and OpenSignal, the data was skewed in favor of T-Mobile. The data was pulled from a one-month period after Verizon first reintroduced its unlimited plans. Verizon's logic wasn't super bulletproof: the company claimed that because it had never before offered unlimited plans, T-Mobile customers -- who were familiar with the concept of throttling after a certain data threshold -- were more likely to be sampled in the crowdsourced data set provided to the NAD. Still, T-Mobile discontinued the disputed commercial, and the NAD felt the need to offer guidelines last week, advising the company not to claim its network was faster or newer. In addition, the NAD also told T-Mobile to modify its claim that it covered 99.7 percent of Verizon customers to make clear that the coverage is by population and not geographic area.
In my experience T-Mobile was faster, but you had to find the single cell tower in the country and stand right under it. That's a bit of a downside.
Because people will easily conflate "hey it covers 99.7% of the people" with "hey, it works almost everywhere that verizon does", which as a t-mobile customer I am painfully aware that coverage is much more spotty as I go to rural areas with t-mobile than my family members that use verizon. For a large portion of the population, *where* it works as they travel is critically important. On the other hand it pretty much doesn't matter *who* it can work for apart for yourself, so 99.7% of other people isn't a metric that has value to a customer, so one assumes it should mean something of value and leaps to coverage area.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"How can T-Mobile cover 99,7 percent of Verizon customers without also covering 99,7 percent (or something very close) of the same geographic area?"
Because people don't use their cell phones exclusively at their billing address, which is what TMo is looking at. When I travel out of an urban area, I'm still covered by VZW. Not so much for those I know with TMo.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I mean, hey, if Our Fearless Leader can do it and get away with it, why not everyone else?
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> If Verizon's customer base were so skewed in that way, they would be spending very large amounts of money to serve a very small customer population across a very large area.
Just the other day we had a couple stories about a carrier sending notices to something like 0.3% of their customers, who live out in the boonies and are roaming on towers owned by another carrier, but they are streaming TV shows.
Consider some Texas counties. Harris county (Houston) and Dallas county each have millions of people. Loving county has 100 people. They are roughly the same size in terms of geographic area.
Suppose Verizon covers Dallas county and Loving county. T-Mobile covers Dallas county, but not Loving. T-Mobile would then cover roughly HALF the geographic area that Verizon does, while covering 99.996% of the people.
> I get this and I get how in certain localized examples it might be the case. However, I don't really see how this can be the case on a national scale
Nationally, almost two-thirds of the population lives in only 3.5% of the land area, according to one government publication. Another set of census data has 80% of Americans living in "urban areas", which total 3% of the land.
So it's very easy for the percentage of people covered to be very different from the percentage of land area covered.
This fact makes all kinds of infrastructure in the US very different than other countries. We have vast areas, millions of square miles, with very few people. France has 1,717 people per square mile, the US has 85. With 25 times as many people in a given area, communication, transportation methods and other infrastructure that makes sense in France or other European countries doesn't work at all in the US, which has 96% less people per area.
You make a good argument, but it has been proven that T-Mobile has been gaming the system of speed tests.
Not that Verizon is any better by going through National Advertising Division (NAD), which belongs to the BBB. Verizon is rated A+ by the BBB and T-Mobile is rated F. And I'm sorry, Better Business Bureau, but if you're going to lie for your paid member, you should at least try to make your lie somewhat halfway believable.
There is no way in hell that anyone would believe Verizon Communications would be rated A+. I would know. I was a Verizon customer for a bit. The coverage was great, but the nickel and diming, the bait and switching, and the fraudulent charges. There is no possible way that they could get a higher rating than T-Mobile (which is what I am currently using right now and which has never tried to rip me off like Verizon was doing).