T-Mobile Strives for Stronger Coverage Without Building More Towers

Instead of constructing more towers or adding equipment to current towers to increase coverage, T-Mobile plans to use VoLTE and low frequency airwaves to achieve their goals. T-Mobile is ranked 4th among U.S. mobile carriers and is often criticized as the network with the worst service. The most obvious way to fix this problem is to build more towers, but that’s not how T-Mobile intends to achieve this goal. According to Android Headlines, “T-Mobile’s plan to develop more on LTE this time around comes in the way of VoLTE, or Voice Over LTE which basically will allow its customers to make calls, while still locked on to the towers with an LTE connection. Currently this isn’t the way that it works. When customers make calls, what happens if the customer is connected to LTE is they quickly get disconnected and reconnected to 2G/Edge to make the call. When the call is finished they reconnect back to LTE. This wouldn’t seem like a huge problem except for the fact that T-Mobile could use those old 2G towers and repurpose them for the current LTE network if they weren’t in use. That’s where being able to make calls over LTE comes in, and they would be able to shut down all those 2G towers, and help strengthen their LTE network with the spectrum they get back. The second part to T-Mobile making the network and it’s coverage better for customers lies in the Low-Frequency Spectrum that they will be receiving from Verizon. The way things work now is that T-Mobile has tons of High Frequency Spectrum, which is really good for the speeds of the network, but as anyone who will tell you that may have tried to use their service in the backs of large grocery stores or buildings, it’s not great for coverage.” Therefore, by investing in low frequency spectrum T-Mobile will be able to expand their coverage without temporarily shutting down towers in order to upgrade them.