Technologies

T-Mobile Is the New Mobile Network Champ. I Got a Behind-the-Scenes View Into How It Got There

In an exclusive chat with T-Mobile executives before the announcement, I learned which moves took the carrier from No. 4 to the top.

Last week T-Mobile announced that it’s been named the Best Mobile Network in the US by Ookla, marking the first time the carrier has taken the overall top spot. That’s based on half a billion real-world usage tests conducted over a six-month period.

(Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

During a live event at its Tech Experience Hub in Bellevue, Washington, T-Mobile also announced a July 23 commercial launch date for T-Satellite, its Starlink-based satellite connectivity service, as well as additional features, such as support for sending images and audio files. And to boost the array of perks that accompany many T-Mobile plans, it’s adding free DoorDash DashPass memberships for subscribers with Magenta status.

“We made big bets on 5G, pushing the limits to deliver speed and coverage no one thought possible,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert. “Now, as the Best Mobile Network in America, with unmatched satellite-to-mobile capability, it’s clear we’re shaping the future of wireless with a network built not just for speed, but for possibility.”

In less than a decade, T-Mobile has gone from a limited-spectrum upstart with a penchant for bright pink branding to the top of the competitive US mobile industry, largely due to the way it’s navigated the transition to 5G networking (and maybe some help from the magenta colors). Merging T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum with Sprint’s midband became one of the main reasons T-Mobile is now crowing about its spot in Ookla’s rankings.

As part of these announcements, T-Mobile invited CNET to an exclusive behind-the-scenes conversation about how it arrived at this point, and a tour of some of the technologies at work at its headquarters and labs.

An unconventional road to 5G

Every company says it’s the best at something, and for a long time, T-Mobile claimed it was the best value among the major wireless carriers. “US consumers have always had to make a choice between going to a much higher priced but higher quality network, or make a trade-off in network and get a better value,” said Mike Katz, T-Mobile president of marketing, strategy and products. “Now it’s validated by a third party [that] customers don’t have to make this choice. They can get both the best value, which T Mobile has always been known and famous for, and get the best network.”

But how did T-Mobile get to this point? It’s easy to say you have the best value and that customers love you, but those are results. At this scale — being one of the top three providers in the US competing for an essential market — it takes a series of technical decisions, a vision of how technology will evolve and the willingness to take big risks.

From a consumer point of view, a few years ago, the focus of every carrier seemed to be to expand coverage, especially 5G coverage. Specifics got lost in the 5G marketing shuffle — every phone-maker touted its 5G compatibility, and the carriers wanted everyone to know that they were expanding their 5G footprint as fast as possible.

But wireless coverage isn’t like a blanket that covers everything equally, and 5G in particular is made up of several speeds and flavors. That’s why your 5G-enabled phone will sometimes indicate the network as “5G,” “5G+,” “5G UC” or other variations, depending on your carrier.

When 5G technologies began to appear in 2020, one focus was on the high speeds possible using the millimeter wave spectrum. But, although millimeter wave can deliver swift connections, it can be thwarted by obstacles such as windows or even plants.

“Primarily, [5G] was going to be a millimeter wave play, which is very high bandwidth with very poor reach,” said Ulf Ewaldsson, T-Mobile’s president of technology. “We went all-in on a very different strategy. We said, ‘it’s going to be a midband play, and it’s going to be TDD [Time Division Duplex, a way to send and receive data in the same frequency] spectrum in the midband that you pair with a very strong low band.’ We were able to get our hands on the best possible spectrum, thanks to merging with Sprint.”

Ewaldsson emphasized that it’s not just a prevalence of low-band that’s advantageous. It’s that, at 600 megahertz, T-Mobile has the lowest band in the low-band area. Why is that important? It has better reach, about 25% to 30% wider than the competition.

That Sprint merger in 2020 sounded like a quick way to buy into the top of the market, a shortcut to expand one’s footprint. (Indeed, T-Mobile is taking a similar tack right now in the broadband market by acquiring fiber provider Lumos in April). But buying Sprint wasn’t an immediate ticket to the top.

“It took about a year extra to get through all the regulatory approvals to get this thing done,” Ewaldsson said, noting that AT&T’s and Verizon’s lead in the market made it a challenge for T-Mobile or Sprint alone to actually enter the 5G race. But with a plan in place to use Sprint’s spectrum and infrastructure, “once we came out [of the approval process], we were right out of the blocks,” he said.

Katz explained that many of T-Mobile’s early disadvantages have turned into benefits. “We have more towers than anybody else, and our towers are closer together,” he said. “We had to build more towers than AT&T and Verizon. We didn’t have any low-band spectrum, which propagates better. So we had to build more towers that were closer together.”

Ewaldsson was more specific. “We have about [and here he paused briefly] 82,715 towers,” he said. “Now, as a turn of events, that happened to be the best possible asset when we merged with Sprint, because we could power up all those towers with that TDD spectrum … and create a formidable downlink speed experience.”

The benefits of the standalone core

Merging T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum with Sprint’s midband became one of the main reasons T-Mobile is now crowing about its spot in Ookla’s rankings.

“We have [a] secret that nobody else has, which is a standalone core. A standalone core is a smarter control over all those towers that stand alone,” Ewaldsson said. “Core allows us to combine low-band and midband and all our bands to get higher and faster experiences for our customers.”

He explained that building out the network more consistently is something other carriers haven’t done. Every T-Mobile tower has nearly the same tri-band configuration.

“You have the same speeds, latency and performance on your apps, wherever you are, and that’s also a secret sauce, too,” he said.

The standalone core enables T-Mobile’s next wave of wireless advancements. In April, the company announced that it had rolled out and successfully tested — with consumer handsets — 5G-Advanced networking, achieving uplink speeds of 550 Mbps. It did so by combining multiple spectrums in a technique called carrier aggregation, which is enabled by the standalone core hardware.

This technology also enables network slicing, a technique T-Mobile has been using commercially for the last two years to guarantee network performance for a specific range of devices, even in crowded or noisy wireless environments. First responders, for example, can be assured they can communicate, even in an emergency environment where other people are all accessing the network.

“You can have a number of different frequencies supporting one single device, one mobile phone,” said Ewaldsson. “If you combine all those resources [into] one device, you can get an incredible bandwidth for a short time, and you can get done with what needs to be done faster. So it creates a better customer experience, because you have an enormous bandwidth that is allocated toward one device, instead of sharing it in one frequency with a bunch of devices.”

How Ookla named T-Mobile the Best Mobile Network in the US

“We’ve known for a long time that the 5G portion of our network is the best,” said Katz, “but this [test] concluded that T-Mobile had the best network. And obviously, we’re very excited about that.”

Both Katz and Ewaldsson emphasized that Ookla’s testing was larger and more comprehensive than earlier metrics. It was performed on over 6 million devices and 500 million test points over a six-month period.

Ewaldsson said it’s an active test, collecting data when customers run the SpeedTest app on their phones, “but it’s also a passive test where, in the background, they’re pulling data from millions of different handsets that are in the hands of real consumers, wherever they are.”

He contrasted that with drive testing, an accepted methodology in which a tester drives routes with a collection of representative phones to prove that a network is good. “We don’t believe in that,” said Ewaldsson. “We believe that if you really want to test this, you’re going to crowdsource it, and that’s exactly what this test has done… and it’s a third-party test.”

The benefit to this approach is that it more closely captures real mobile usage, according to Ewaldsson, such as people texting and sending email, viewing social apps, watching video clips, playing games and more. Millions of people are also operating under real-world conditions, which can include factors such as pockets of interference or scarcity. Verizon disputes Ookla’s methodology, saying that drive testing is a more accurate way to measure network performance.

Getting to this point hasn’t been a glide path for T-Mobile, and it still faces turbulence. Just in the past few months, T-Mobile has raised prices on many of its legacy plans (and then turned around and gave out free lines to some). It has also switched all of its current plans to a model that does not include taxes and fees, some of which incrementally increased this spring. Until this year, the main unlimited data plans incorporated taxes and fees into the monthly cost.

T-Satellite goes online in July with more features

T-Mobile’s wireless performance is not the only thing looking skyward. The T-Satellite service, which enables texting from most smartphones via the network of over 620 Starlink satellites when out of range of cellular or Wi-Fi networks, will leave beta status on July 23 and be open to anyone. Pricing for the service will be $10 a month, except for customers on the Experience Beyond and Go5G Next plan, which includes T-Satellite as part of the package.

That price will apply even if you’re a customer of a competing service like AT&T or Verizon; T-Satellite can be activated as a second eSIM on supported devices. Katz said there are currently over 1.8 million customers in the beta program, including tens of thousands of competitors’ customers.

He also pointed out that during the beta, three times more messages were received than sent. “If you can’t receive an incoming message because you haven’t manually connected your phone, you’re not really reachable and, in my opinion, you’re not really connected,” he said, referring to the way competitors’ phones initiate a satellite link.

The T-Satellite service will include 911 emergency texting later this year, which will be available to any mobile subscriber, even if they haven’t signed up for T-Satellite service (provided their devices can make the connection).

“We just think that with a technology like this, no customer should ever be in a situation where they are unconnected in an emergency,” said Katz.

That’s not the last of the satellite news, though. T-Satellite will enable MMS messaging to send pictures and short audio clips via satellite on Android phones, with iOS support coming later. In a demonstration I witnessed at T-Mobile’s 5G Hub, sending an image, text and requisite burst of emojis wasn’t exactly speedy, but they arrived within 30 to 90 seconds.

Building on that, T-Mobile will bring data service to T-Satellite starting Oct. 1. Considering how satellite bandwidth is constrained, T-Mobile is working with operating system providers to implement an API that developers can use to allow reasonable data access in their apps over the satellite connection. Don’t expect to stream Netflix while you’re camping in the wilderness, but apps such as All Trails will be able to fetch updated information.

“This will be the first time you’ve seen a direct-to-cell satellite network support data services,” said Katz. “We’ve worked with many different app developers to help them build their apps to recognize that they’re connected to satellite and optimize for satellite data.”

DoorDash deliveries without all the fees

When it comes to mobile plan perks, T-Mobile has found success with its Magenta Status goodies, which range from everyday discounts on stays at Hilton hotels to T-Mobile Tuesdays, which offer deals such as a recent Wingstop promotion (during which many of the restaurant’s locations ran out of chicken nationwide). Katz said the company has seen 1.2 billion redemptions of T-Mobile Tuesdays offers.

On July 8, Magenta Status is gaining a new perk: T-Mobile is partnering with DoorDash to give customers on the most popular plans DashPass service free for a year. Eligible customers can claim the offer through Aug. 4 via T-Mobile Tuesdays in the T-Life app.

“I think DoorDash did something like 2 billion deliveries last year, and the average price of a delivery is $3 to $4,” said Katz. “If you have DashPass, you don’t pay delivery fees at all. This can save our customers hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”

Incentives to switch and T-Mobile’s future

Eager to entice customers of the major competing services, T-Mobile is launching the Easy Upgrade program that makes it “screamingly simple,” in Katz’s words, to switch to T-Mobile. He specifically mentioned Verizon customers “who signed up with Verizon because they believed, and for years it was true, that Verizon had the best network,” he said. “And now that we’re in a place where it’s definitively clear that T-Mobile has the best network, we want to make it really easy for Verizon customers to come and join the Un-carrier.”

Katz said T-Mobile will pay off every cost to switch, including the remaining cost of devices up to $800, and give customers a new Apple or Android device without requiring a trade-in (be sure to read the details of these deals).

T-Mobile’s ascent to the top of Ookla’s list shows that, even though the mobile market in the US is dominated by just a few large players, the field is in flux. AT&T and Verizon continue to build out their own networks and strategies — Verizon has teased a “Project 624” that is rumored to be revealed on June 24, for instance. Now that T-Mobile has established this lead, I’m eager to see how it plans to hold onto it.

Technologies

G10’s ‘surprise’ currency star could stumble as peers hike interest rates

The British pound has benefited from a resilient economy and rate hike expectations, but the BOE looks increasingly dovish while a crucial budget lies ahead.

The British pound has largely shrugged off another change of government and geopolitical shocks to outperform many of its peers this year, but the currency’s recent weakness could be set to deepen.

Sterling has gained around 1.6% against the euro

It is near-flat against the U.S. dollar

The resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer on July 20 left Britain facing its seventh leader in 10 years, with markets watching closely whether a new administration would hold to the “fiscal rules” repeatedly emphasized by former Finance Minister Rachel Reeves.

U.K. borrowing costs have risen under Starmer’s quickly appointed successor Andy Burnham, also of the center-left Labour Party, but that has occurred in lockstep with a global government bond sell-off.

Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at financial services firm Ebury, said that a “clean and orderly transition of power” had “removed a potential banana skin and eased the perceived political risk premium attached to the pound.”

Britain’s long-term borrowing costs are the highest since 1998

In a Friday note, Ryan said sterling had been “the surprise outperformer” among the G10 group of wealthy nations over the past three months, tying this to an unexpectedly resilient U.K. economy.

Gross domestic product grew by 0.4% in the second quarter, following 0.6% expansion in the first quarter — one of the strongest performances among advanced economies. Sunny weather and excitement around the FIFA World Cup boosted consumer spending, while business activity remained surprisingly resilient despite the volatile geopolitical backdrop.

The pound also drew support at the start of the Iran conflict in April on outsized market expectations for a monetary policy response to inflation fears from the Bank of England, Jane Foley, senior FX strategist at Rabobank, told CNBC.

The U.K. is highly vulnerable to higher oil and gas costs, both of which have spiked this year, helping push headline inflation near 3%.

Sterling weakness ahead?

Despite the resurgence of price pressures, the Bank of England has held its key interest rate at 3.75% throughout this year.

Current market pricing suggests low odds of a rate hike at its September meeting. In contrast, there are high expectations for a hike by the European Central Bank on Wednesday and, increasingly, the Federal Reserve later this month.

Central bank rate hikes typically boost their home currency.

Dovish messaging by the BOE on Sept. 17 would “further expose the pound” just before markets get anxious for the first annual budget announcement of Burnham’s administration on Oct. 28, Foley of Rabobank noted.

New U.K. Finance Minister John Healey said in a Monday speech that he would remain committed to fiscal discipline, while targeting a more even distribution of economic growth around the country — in contrast to the concentration of growth in powerhouse London.

JP Morgan U.K. economist Allan Monks said his remarks suggested a cautious approach to tax and spending changes given the backdrop of higher borrowing costs. The budget is likely to retain a focus on devolution, greater public control of public services and more private sector partnerships, but contain little to change the macro outlook, Monks said in a note Monday.

Ebury’s Matthew Ryan said the budget contained a high level of political risk, and was likely to contain “a combination of higher ancillary tax rates and an increase in debt issuance in order to fund Burnham’s spending ambitions.”

These could include changes to taxes on property purchases and local council duties, an introduction of a “mansion tax” and tighter pension and personal investment account relief, he said, adding that markets would be jumpy over anything that looked likely to dampen growth and squeeze the private sector, while simultaneously requiring more borrowing.

Technologies

Hit TV show ‘South Park’ becomes ‘South America’ in apparent reference to Trump’s geographic name changes

Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said in a statement that they were “inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google.”

Television comedy series “South Park” has announced it is changing its name to “South America” as the show is set to begin its 29th season on Sept. 16.

The show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Parker and Stone’s statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid a trade spat with Canada. Canadian officials said they will not recognize the new name.

Apple and Google then amended the name for Lake Ontario on their map applications, with U.S. users seeing “Lake America,” while Canadian users saw “Lake Ontario.”

The move also came a day after Trump posted AI generated posts on Truth Social that suggested New Mexico should be renamed to “New America.”

Last year, the president used an executive order to change the name for the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, drawing international opposition.

“South Park” won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the “Sermon on the Mount” episode which premiered last year and parodies Trump’s presidency.

The “Skydance Capitulation” line comes after the $8 billion merger between parent company Paramount and Skydance, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year after Paramount settled a lawsuit brought by Trump for $16 million.

Trump had alleged an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2024 with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was deceptively edited.

Paramount subsidiary CBS News in July 2025 said it was canceling comedian Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing financial reasons, just days after Colbert accused Paramount of paying Trump a “big fat bribe.” The final episode of the show aired in May.

Paramount and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Technologies

Trump Claims No Regret Over Initiating Iran Conflict Amid Rising U.S. Economic Sanctions

Trump insists he has no regrets about initiating the Iran conflict, warning that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten Israel and U.S. cities, while the administration ramps up economic sanctions. He predicts the war will end after the midterms, even as markets brace for a prolonged standoff.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has no regrets about starting the Iran war and added that “If I had it to do again, I would do exactly what I did.” Speaking to Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham on Thursday stateside, Trump said that he would have attacked Iran despite the impact on the midterm elections. “If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now,” Ingraham told Trump, to which Trump replied “supposing we were cruising, and all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon. They would use it.” He added that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, the Islamic Republic would “wipe out” Israel and the Middle East, and start hitting U.S. cities.

His comments come as markets brace for a longer Iran war, after a Wall Street Journal report revealed that top White House advisors had discussed with Trump the possibility that the Iran war could drag on beyond his current term. Trump has said that the war will end immediately after the midterm elections and oil and gas prices will also fall, adding to his months-long claims that the conflict will end soon.

In separate comments to NewsNation on Thursday, Trump denied reports that there was any damage to U.S. assets, after Iran claimed it had hit multiple U.S. fighter aircraft at a base in Jordan. “No damage. No nothing,” Trump said, when asked if there was any truth to the reports.

Economic pressure: Washington is continuing efforts to isolate Iran from its economic network, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagging sanctions against “a large bank” next week. “We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11. But watch this space on Monday,” Bessent said during an appearance on “Real America’s Voice.” Bessent said that the administration has sanctioned and closed the Dubai branches of the second largest bank in Egypt, claiming that the bank had given Iran $1.8 billion dollars. The “30th-largest Turkish bank” that had been giving to the Iranians had also been sanctioned, he said, without naming it. The U.S. had sanctioned Turkey-based Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi (Golden Global Bank) and its subsidiaries last week.

Trump, in the NewsNation interview, was also asked how Iran could continue holding out under the current economic pressure. “I don’t know that they’re gonna be able to hold out,” Trump said. “But it’ll get settled after the elections. Or maybe sooner. But it’ll get settled right after the election.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Bessent said the 30th largest Turkish bank had been sanctioned. An earlier version misstated the bank’s ranking.