T-Mobile announced today at a live event held at its Tech Experience 5G Hub in Bellevue, Washington, that it has been chosen by Ookla as the Best Mobile Network in the US based on half a billion real-world use assessments conducted over the course of six months. This marks the first time T-Mobile has taken the entire top position. &nbsp,

( Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis. )

We “pushed the boundaries,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert,” we made great wagers on 5G, pushing the limits” to provide velocity and coverage. ” Today, as the Best Mobile Network in America, with unparalleled satellite-to-mobile capacity, it’s obvious we’re shaping the future of mobile with a system built not just for velocity, but for possibility”.

Additionally, the company revealed more functions as well as a July 23 commercial start date for T-Satellite, its Starlink-based satellite communication services. Because T-Mobile has associated its cellular company with an ongoing range of perks, the organization is also adding completely DoorDash DashPass memberships for T-Mobile subscribers with Magenta standing.

T-Mobile has overcame the transition to 5G network in less than ten years as a limited-spectrum industrialist with a penchant for bright red brand. This is mainly due to the way it has navigated the change ( and perhaps some help from the magenta colors ). Merging T-Mobile‘s low-band spectrum with Sprint’s mid-band became one of the main reasons T-Mobile is now crowing about its spot in Ookla’s rankings.

T-Mobile invited CNET to a private behind-the-scenes discussion about how it got here, as well as a tour of some of the technologies at work at its headquarters and labs, as part of these announcements.

An unconventional road to 5G

Every company claims to be the best at something, and T-Mobile has long asserted that it is the best value among the major wireless providers for a long time. ” US consumers have always had to make a choice between going to a much higher priced but higher quality network, or make a trade-off in network and get a better value”, said Mike Katz, T-Mobile president of marketing, strategy and products. Customers no longer have to make this choice because it has been verified by a third party. They can get both the best value, which T Mobile has always been known and famous for, and get the best network”.

How, then, did T-Mobile arrive at this point? It’s easy to say you have the best value and that customers love you, but those are results. Being one of the top three US companies in the US in a crucial market requires a number of technical choices, a vision of how technology will evolve, and a willingness to take big risks.

From a consumer point of view, a few years ago, the focus of every carrier seemed to be to expand coverage, especially 5G coverage. Every phone manufacturer promoted its 5G compatibility, but the carriers wanted everyone to know that they were expanding their 5G footprint as quickly as possible.

But wireless coverage isn’t like a blanket that covers everything equally, and 5G in particular is made up of several speeds and flavors. Depending on your carrier, your 5G-enabled phone may occasionally display the network as “5G”, “5G+,” “5G UC,” or other variations.

When 5G technologies began to appear in 2020, one focus was on the high speeds possible using the millimeter wave spectrum. However, millimeter waves can prevent quick connections by blocking them with obstacles like plants or windows.

” Primarily, ]5G] was going to be a millimeter wave play, which is very high bandwidth with very poor reach”, said Ulf Ewaldsson, T-Mobile’s president of technology. We “went all-in on a very different strategy.” We said,’ it’s going to be a mid-band play, and it’s going to be TDD]Time Division Duplex, a way to send and receive data in the same frequency ] spectrum in the mid-band that you pair with a very strong low band.’ Thanks to merging with Sprint, we were able to obtain the best spectrum possible.

Ewaldsson emphasized that it’s not just a prevalence of low-band that’s advantageous. That’s why T-Mobile has the lowest band in the low-band band at 600 megahertz. Why is that important? Its reach is wider, about 25 % to 30 %, than the competition.

That Sprint merger in 2020 sounded like a quick way to buy into the top of the market, a shortcut to expand one’s footprint. In fact, T-Mobile is currently attempting to compete with Lumos, a provider of fiber, in the broadband market, in April. But buying Sprint wasn’t an immediate ticket to the top.

According to Ewaldsson, “it took about a year more to get through all the regulatory approvals to get this thing done,” noting that T-Mobile or Sprint’s lead in the market made it difficult for them to enter the 5G race by themselves. But with a plan in place to use Sprint’s spectrum and infrastructure, “once we came out]of the approval process], we were right out of the blocks”, he said.

Katz explained that many of T-Mobile’s early drawbacks have come to be advantageous. ” We have more towers than anybody else, and our towers are closer together”, he said. More towers were required than those built by AT&amp, T, and Verizon. We didn’t have any low-band spectrum, which propagates better. Therefore, we had to construct more towers that were closer together.

Ewaldsson was more specific. We have about [and here he paused for a brief moment ] 82, 715 towers, he said. ” Now, as a turn of events, that happened to be the best possible asset when we merged with Sprint, because we could power up all those towers with that TDD spectrum … and create a formidable downlink speed experience”.

The advantages of the standalone core

Merging T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum with Sprint’s mid-band became one of the main reasons T-Mobile is now crowing about its spot in Ookla’s rankings.

We have a standalone core that no one else has, which is a secret. A standalone core is a smarter control over all those towers that stand alone”, Ewaldsson said. ” Core enables us to combine all of our bands, including low-band,” to deliver customers with higher and more rapid experiences.

He explained that building out the network more consistently is something other carriers haven’t done. Nearly the same tri-band setup is found in every T-Mobile tower.

” You have the same speeds, latency and performance on your apps, wherever you are, and that’s also a secret sauce, too”, he said.

The standalone core allows T-Mobile’s newest wave of wireless advancements. In April, the company announced that it had rolled out and successfully tested– with consumer handsets– 5G-Advanced networking, achieving uplink speeds of 550 Mbps. The standalone core hardware enabled carrier aggregation, which involves combining multiple spectrums.

This technology also enables network slicing, a technique T-Mobile has been using commercially for the last two years to guarantee network performance for a specific range of devices, even in crowded or noisy wireless environments. First responders, for instance, can be certain that they can communicate, even in a situation where everyone is logged into the network at once.

” You can have a number of different frequencies supporting one single device, one mobile phone”, said Ewaldsson. ” If you combine all those resources ]into one device, you can quickly get the most out of what needs to be done more quickly. So it creates a better customer experience, because you have an enormous bandwidth that is allocated toward one device, instead of sharing it in one frequency with a bunch of devices”.

How Ookla named T-Mobile the Best Mobile Network in the US

” We’ve known for a long time that the 5G portion of our network is the best”, said Katz,” but this]test ] concluded that T-Mobile had the best network. We’re obviously very excited about that.

Both Katz and Ewaldsson emphasized that Ookla’s testing was larger and more comprehensive than earlier metrics. Over the course of six months, it was carried out on more than 6 million devices and 500 million test points.

Ewaldsson said it’s an active test, collecting data when customers run the SpeedTest app on their phones,” but it’s also a passive test where, in the background, they’re pulling data from millions of different handsets that are in the hands of real consumers, wherever they are”.

He compared that to drive testing, a practiced method that uses a group of test-beds” to demonstrate that a network is good,” he said. We don’t believe in that. We think that if you really want to test this, you must crowdsource it, which is exactly what this test has done because it is a third-party test.

The benefit to this approach is that it more closely captures real mobile usage– people texting and sending email, viewing social apps, watching video clips, playing games and more. Millions of people also operate in situations that are real, including ones that involve sources of conflict or resource scarcity.

Getting to this point hasn’t been a glide path for T-Mobile, and it still faces turbulence. Just recently, T-Mobile has raised prices on many of its legacy plans ( and then turned around and handed out free lines to some ) in the last few months ). It has also switched all of its current plans to a model that does not include taxes and fees, some of which incrementally increased this spring. Up until this year, the main unlimited data plans included fees and taxes into the monthly price.

T-Satellite goes online in July with more features

Not just the wireless performance of T-Mobile provides a vista. The T-Satellite service, which enables texting from most smartphones via the network of over 620 Starlink satellites when out of range of cellular or Wi-Fi networks, will leave beta status on July 23 and be open to anyone. Customers on the Go5G Next and Experience Beyond plans, which include T-Satellite as part of the package, will pay$ 10 per month in addition.

That price will apply even if you’re a customer of a competing service like AT&amp, T or Verizon, T-Satellite can be activated as a second eSIM on supported devices. Katz estimated that the beta program currently has over 1.8 million users, including tens of thousands of customers from competitors.

He also pointed out that during the beta, three times more messages were received than sent”. You’re not really reachable and, in my opinion, you’re not really connected, he said, referring to the way that competitors ‘ phones initiate a satellite link. If you can’t receive an incoming message because you haven’t manually connected your phone, you’re not really connected.

The T-Satellite service will include 911 emergency texting later this year, which will be available to any mobile subscriber, even if they haven’t signed up for T-Satellite service ( provided their devices can make the connection ).

No customer should ever be left without a connection in an emergency thanks to technology like this, Katz said.

That’s not the last of the satellite news, though. On Android phones, T-Satellite will support MMS messaging and will soon support MMS messaging for short audio clips and photos. In a demonstration I witnessed at T-Mobile’s 5G Hub, sending an image, text and requisite burst of emojis wasn’t exactly speedy, but they arrived within 30 to 90 seconds.

T-Mobile will add data service to T-Satellite starting on October 1st, expanding on that. Considering how satellite bandwidth is constrained, T-Mobile is working with operating system providers to implement an API that developers can use to allow reasonable data access in their apps over the satellite connection. While camping in the wilderness, apps like All Trails will be able to fetch up-to-date information, so don’t expect to stream Netflix.

” This will be the first time you’ve seen a direct-to-cell satellite network support data services,” said Katz”. We’ve collaborated with a number of different app developers to enable them to build their apps that recognize and optimize for satellite data.

DoorDash deliveries without all the fees

T-Mobile has had success with its Magenta Status goodies, which include daily discounts on stays at Hilton hotels as well as T-Mobile Tuesdays, which offer deals like a recent Wingstop promotion ( during which many of the restaurant’s locations ran out of chicken nationwide ). Katz said the company has seen 1.2 billion redemptions of T-Mobile Tuesdays offers.

A new benefit for Magenta Status is available for July 8: T-Mobile is partnering with DoorDash to offer customers on the most well-known plans the DashPass service for free for a year. Eligible customers can claim the offer through Aug. 4 via T-Mobile Tuesdays in the T-Life app. &nbsp,

” I think DoorDash did something like 2 billion deliveries last year, and the average price of a delivery is$ 3 to$ 4,” said Katz”. If you use DashPass, you are completely free from any delivery costs. This can save our customers hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”

Switch incentives and the future of T-Mobile

Eager to entice customers of the major competing services, T-Mobile is launching the Easy Upgrade program that makes it” screamingly simple, “in Katz’s words, to switch to T-Mobile. He specifically made reference to “verizon customers” who signed up with Verizon because they believed, and for years it was true, that Verizon had the best network, “he said.” And now that we’re in a place where it’s definitively clear that T-Mobile has the best network, we want to make it really easy for Verizon customers to come and join the Un-carrier.”

Katz stated that T-Mobile will cover all costs associated with switching, including the remaining cost of devices up to$ 800, and provide customers with a new Apple or Android device without the need for a trade-in ( be sure to read the , details of these deals ).

T-Mobile’s ascent to the top of Ookla’s list shows that, even though the mobile market in the US is dominated by just a few large players, the field is in flux. AT&amp, T, and Verizon continue to develop their own networks and strategies, including a rumored” Project 624″ tease that was revealed on June 24. Now that T-Mobile has established this lead, I’m eager to see how it plans to hold onto it.