Un-carrier Customers Win the Super Bowl!

By Neville RayFebruary 05, 2017

Holy moly, what a game! The Patriots weren’t the only winners last night – T-Mobile customers also won big at the Super Bowl with unlimited data and super-fast LTE.

The other day, I predicted our network would be the fastest at this year’s game—just like we were last year. And, no surprise, the most advanced LTE network in the US crushed it. Crushed it all around. We trounced Verizon and AT&T so hard – on both upload and download speeds – that it wasn’t much of a competition. AT&T and Verizon even lost to Sprint. That's like the pros losing to a high school team. Ouch. Verizon talked a big game, but they barely beat AT&T on download speeds, and came in dead last when you look at download and upload speeds combined. I’d say there’s always next year for them, but we’re already juicing our network in Minneapolis. Sorry not sorry guys.

 

 

Speed tests taken 2/5 at NRG Stadium, Houston, Texas.  Typical nationwide download speeds are 24.0 Mbps for AT&T, 15.3 Mbps for Sprint, 24.3 Mbps for Verizon and 24.5 Mbps for T-Mobile according to T-Mobile’s analysis of Ookla Speedtest results provided by Ookla, Oct-Dec 2016.

Not only was our LTE network the fastest at the game this year, but it was a full 150% faster than during last year’s game, even though we had a lot more customers using nearly twice as much data! Of course, with blistering speed combined with unlimited data, we saw Un-carrier customers at the stadium cut loose with their smartphones during the game using five times more data than usual. A few fun facts ….

  • Un-carrier customers saw upload speeds nearly twice as fast as Verizon and Sprint, and download speeds nearly twice as fast as Verizon and AT&T
  • And, thanks to those blistering speeds and unlimited data, they uploaded nearly twice as much data than usual, sharing their #UnlimitedMoves, pictures and real-time video from the game – with 3,000 posts per minute to Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. And about two and a half Tinder swipes per minute.
  • Customers at last night’s game blew past last year’s total data usage amount before halftime.
  • Social media apps drove 33 percent of data usage, and 36 percent was video streaming from Netflix and YouTube.
  • The most shared moment of the game was immediately after the final, game winning touchdown when we saw a 15% spike in data usage.
  • Customers made three times more voice calls than usual and tore through data without worrying about overages or limits, like carrier customers have to, at a pace that would equal using 24 GB in a month – each. That’s the same amount Verizon gives you to share across four lines on their XXL plan!

I bet Verizon’s totally limited customers used a lot less data so they could avoid big overages. Unless they’re into that sort of thing…

 

 

The Patriots coming back to win in overtime was something no one expected, but I knew all along what the outcome of the Super Bowl would be as far as our customers’ network experience was concerned. To ensure wicked-fast speeds to the massive crowds, we permanently built out our LTE capacity in Houston – a stark contrast to the carriers’ approach. And we’ve delivered America’s fastest nationwide 4G LTE network for over three years and counting, according to independent third party data based on tens of millions of real-time, crowd-sourced tests by millions of real customers using their own real devices everywhere they live, work and play.

We already have the most advanced LTE network today, and it’s faster and advancing faster than any other. And unfortunately for the competition, we won’t stop.