T-Mobile Eyes Fatter Pipes for 4G LTE

T-Mobile's CTO is promising fatter pipes for faster 4G LTE services from the operator coming soon.

T-Mobile US Inc. says that LTE is now live across 223 markets, with 202 million potential pops and 91 percent of the top 100 major metro areas covered. The operator had said that it would cover at least 200 million people by the end of the year. (See: T-Mobile Plays LTE Catch Up.)

Many of those markets are now moving to 2x10MHz channels that should speed up T-Mobile's 4G services. CTO Neville Ray told Light Reading last week he expects to have the fatter pipes in 100 hundred markets "by the end of the year" including in 90 percent of the top 25 metro areas.

This will include updates from 2x5MHz in New York City to the larger channels by the end of the quarter. The network watchers at OpenSignal are already finding that T-Mobile's LTE network is plenty fast.

Here's how OpenSignal breaks down the top 10 biggest cities in the US based on "a combination of overall coverage, download speed, upload speed, and latency."

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray is eyeing 2x15MHz and 2x20MHz channel updates for next year and beyond. "20-plus-20 is going to be a 2014 to 2015 story for us," he said.

T-Mobile has 2x20MHz channels tests now running in the labs, and Ray is looking to expand those tests. "We're working hard to see if we can do it by the end of the year," Ray told us.

He stressed that any live 2x20MHz channel tests will be "very small" deployments initially.

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— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading