In August, Helium Mobile launched a $5 per month unlimited plan that was exclusively available in the Miami area. At the time, I wrote: Peter Adderton, founder of Boost Mobile and current CEO of MobileX, offered a valid correction: @Coverage_Critic I corrected the story " it’s arguably the cheapest unlimited plan in miami ." 😀 […]
A major update to the coverage map is coming shortly, but I wanted to release a small, interim update first. With the update released today, the map now defaults to a green-red color scheme for all networks. While the brand-specific colors used previously were kind of fun, I don’t think the meaning of different shades […]
Today, the FCC announced the release of the third version of the National Broadband Map. The map shows the availability of internet service providers and cellular coverage throughout the US. Improved Reliability The FCC suggested the map is becoming more reliable with successive versions: Newer Data With the recent release, a new round of data […]
In T-Mobile’s earnings call earlier today, CEO Mike Sievert reiterated that the company is walking away from forced plan migrations and associated price increases. Every company has bad ideas. T-Mobile put a stop to this bad idea before it adversely affected customers. Maybe that says something positive about T-Mobile. On the other hand, the suggestion […]
Earlier this month, a now-deleted post on Reddit and an article from The Mobile Report broke a story about an impending price increase for T-Mobile customers. Leaked documents suggested that T-Mobile would switch some customers on older plans to different plans with monthly prices $5 to $10 higher. Customers would be alerted of the upcoming […]
Cell phone carriers regularly impose limits to reign in heavy data users. A carrier may throttle a user’s data, deprioritize a user’s data, or both. Throttling limits a user to a specific maximum speed (e.g., 256kbps). Deprioritizing lowers the priority of a user’s data transfer relative to other users on a network. If a network […]
Years ago, some cell carriers introduced “soft caps” for data. Subscribers that used their allotted data could continue accessing the internet at a vastly reduced speed of 128kbps. In some cases, this was a nice perk. A subscriber to Mint Mobile’s old 3GB plan who had run out of data might still be able to […]
Vehicles with DIMO hardware are driving millions of miles per week and contributing anonymized data to Coverage Critic’s interactive crowdsourced map. Here’s how the new map presents T-Mobile’s coverage around New York City. Green shading indicates strong signals. As the signals weaken, the shading morphs to yellow and eventually red. While the map is less […]
Helium Mobile is coming out of beta and offering an unlimited plan for $5 per month. It’s arguably the cheapest unlimited plan on the US market. But the price is kind of contrived. Helium Mobile’s Networks First some background details. Helium Mobile is an MVNO running over T-Mobile’s network. However, the carrier has a novel […]
Verizon shared a press release indicating it’s now able to use of all of the C-Band spectrum it purchased licenses for two years ago: Verizon already deployed a lot of hardware that can use the newly available C-Band spectrum. Improved network quality should hit consumers almost immediately. Here’s another bit from the press release (emphasis […]