T-Mobile Now Using Crowdsourcing for Their Coverage Map
T-Mobile has been long known for their infamous “un-carrier” campaign to eliminate expensive phone contracts offered through companies like Verizon and AT&T. It’s safe to say that the company likes to shake up the mobile phone industry. Just today thought, the company has announced their real-time crowdsourced coverage maps. Noting that they are “the industry’s first and only crowdsourced, customer-verified network coverage map.”
The companies chief technology officer, Neville Ray, says the new method will help customers decide whether service is available in their area. As it stands, carriers use old, outdated maps that are based on imperfect methods and dated data.
It’s not uncommon to hear someone complaining about T-Mobile’s service. They may be the third-largest carrier in the US, but it looks like the company is trying to change that.
With the new T-Mobile coverage map, more than 200 million user data points will be recorded per day, along with trusted data from Inrix. The map will include:
- 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.
Pretty neat to say the least.