T-Mobile and Sprint have joined forces, but the process of merging the two networks is an ongoing venture, notes PCMag.com. T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray told a Citi Global TMT West conference audience, that Sprint customers were already enjoying the benefit of a T-Mobile connection, but were only beginning to truly transition to T-Mobile.
“Sprint customers, a lot of their traffic is on the T-Mobile network … we’ve more than tripled the Net Promoter Score among Sprint customers,” agreed T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert. At this time, Ray confirmed that “North of 20 percent of Sprint users are on the T-Mobile network.”
The Sprint network is still in use by Sprint subscribers, but T-Mobile says that these same customers now have access to areas covered by T-Mobile that were previously inaccessible to Sprint. In turn, T-Mobile is expanding its own 5G capabilities by making use of Sprint’s old Band 41 “Spark” spectrum.
“On the ultra high-capacity mid-band layer, to have 106 million covered pops inside nine months is remarkable. We’re targeting 200 million nationwide by the end of this year,” said Ray. He added that speeds were averaging 280-320 Mbps on the Band 41 network. The increase is seven to eight times better than what T-Mobile users experience on LTE, he said.
Combining resources for the moment will give T-Mobile extra channels to use while it is setting up its own network. “The decommissioning is going to come at the tail end of this process,” confirmed T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik.
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