Over 230 million Americans now have access to T-Mobile’s LTE network

Earlier this month T-Mobile said it was on track to cover 230 million Americans with LTE service, and today the carrier claims it has officially hit that goal. CEO John Legere broke the news on Twitter, using the opportunity to take a shot at the competition. T-Mobile may be beating Sprint when it comes to POPs but the UnCarrier is still lagging behind its larger competitors. Back in February, AT&T was at 280 million POPs of LTE, while Verizon had already passed 300 million LTE POPs. At the time Sprint was at 200 million LTE POPs, though we’re not sure how much the carrier’s footprint has expanded since then. With T-Mobile quickly catching up to Sprint, and even beating the competing carrier by some metrics, it will be interesting to see what happens if Sprint’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile goes through.

In a blog post earlier this month, T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray outlined plans for the company’s LTE network. As well as outlining new markets to receive 15+15MHz networks, and VoLTE, he announced that T-Mobile would have 230 million people covered by its LTE airwaves by the end of this month.Turns out, that milestone was hit last Friday. And – of course – Legere couldn’t announce it without a swipe at one of his competitors. As for why we’re only posting it now, today happens to be the day T-Mo decided to let everyone know. As we know, from being sent LTE sightings from across the U.S. T-Mobile is far from done. New locations are lighting up with HSPA and LTE virtually every week, it seems. From what we can make out, at the moment, the locations seem to be along major highways between cities. With those developments, and the ever-increasing number of people able to make calls over LTE networks (VoLTE) and wideband LTE expansion, T-Mobile’s network team is doing a lot of great work at the moment. All we’re waiting for now is the 700MHz acquired from Verizon to be put in to use.