T-Mobile introduces new next-gen coverage map w/ customer data updated biweekly

T-Mobile has today unveiled what it hopes will be the next-generation of network maps, breathing new life into the carrier coverage maps of old. T-Mobile says that its new “Next-Gen Network Map” is the industry’s first crowd-sourced map, and reflects “near real-time customer experiences.”

“It’s our nature to expose and eradicate broken wireless industry norms,” T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said in the company’s blog post announcing the new coverage map. Not only does the new map bring in customer-verified coverage data for sections as small as 100 square meters, but T-Mobile is also bringing in information from third-parties like Speedtest.net, Inrix and others, to verify that this data is accurate and complete.

The new data is based on 200 million actual customer usage data points, and will be updated every two weeks—and T-Mobile says this compares to data from other carriers that could be months or years old. There have been far better technologies available “for some time now,” the company says, and this map will be the first to take advantage of them.

Features of our new coverage map 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.

To see the new map in action, head over to T-Mobile’s website. You’ll see that as you zoom in that there are hexagons with little check marks inside them—this means that these blocks are using the new real-time customer verified data.