T-Mobile happy on being considered 5G competitor by Verizon, but users unhappy with GPS issues

5G is for the most part still in its infancy. Globally, only a handful of telcos, especially in first world countries (such as Verizon, T-Mobile etc. in the US) have rolled out the same.

The 5G phone situation is also unrefined as only a handful of devices from the likes of Samsung, OnePlus and Motorola support 5G (albeit partially). The situation is expected to improve going into the ‘smartphone season’ of 2020.

It is the time of Super Bowl mania in the US and apart from the NFL games, many are excited about the halftime ads. T-Mobile is super thrilled too, as they recently rolled out its nationwide 5G network and has spared no chance to throw shade at Verizon.

Via a rather long letter from T-Mobile CEO John Legere, the company explains how delighted they are that Verizon has finally considered them a worthy competitor after years of ignoring their presence in the market altogether.

The CEO also goes to point out how he feels like Verizon’s future is bleak as competition is quickly catching up and thanks to a few missed steps in the rollout of 5G, other operators might steal the cake from big red.

Verizon bet wrong on the 5G future. They bet big on millimeter-wave 5G, and that was a bad bet. It hasn’t scaled like they thought it would. So Verizon customers are forced to pay a premium for sad, spotty coverage in random parts of some areas of some cities.

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Verizon’s millimeter-wave 5G delivers speeds upwards of 1Gbps but at the expense of signal strength and range. Millimeter-waves are easily blocked by anything in its patch, including glass or trees. Verizon’s solution was to build as many of these 5G nodes as possible.

T-Mobile’s approach is the exact opposite, focusing on low band. This delivers adequate range and penetration, but sacrifices on speed, delivering only about three times faster bandwidth than typical 4G speeds.

Even as T-Mobile gloats on its upper hand over Verizon, users of some of the 5G devices on its network continue to face issues with GPS.

We have earlier talked about the problems that Galaxy Note 10 5G and OnePlus 7T McLaren users on T-Mobile are not able to use Google Maps or any other apps that require a GPS lock signal. You can find out more here.

Various attempts by T-Mobile to fix this issue have been less than fruitful as some users still experience these issues even after updates meant to fix this bug. Users are still awaiting a comprehensive fix or a statement from T-Mobile.

NOTE: We have more T-Mobile related stories here.

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