T-Mobile’s New LTE Network Spotted Being Tested In 8 Major U.S. Cities

While T-Mobile is more than a bit late to the LTE game, the company confirmed on Monday that their new network would be launching by the end of the month. Where it would launch, however, was kept under wraps.

That’s the idea, at least. Thanks to some data mined out of a third-party app, we’ve got a pretty good idea where T-Mobile is starting to fire things up.

When the guys over at OpenSignal noticed what seemed to be a bunch of engineers using OpenSignal’s signal analysis/mapping app to test a network they’d never seen before, they followed the data on down the rabbit hole.

As of this morning, they’ve found T-Mobile’s LTE network being tested in eight major cities:

  • San Jose (and a few other nearby Bay Area regions)
  • Seattle
  • Denver
  • Las Vegas
  • New Orleans
  • New York
  • San Diego
  • Kansas City

The list isn’t perfect, of course. Some cities may not be ready to go live on launch day, and engineers in other cities might have picked other testing tools. With that said, it’s probably a safe bet that the above make up a good chunk of T-Mobile’s main launch targets.

As OpenSignal’s testing tool sends them details about network speed, they also dug out a rough idea of the average performance on T-Mobile’s shiny new network: 25 Mb/s download and 8 Mb/s upload, with about 40ms of latency. That’s not too shabby — but that’s also with, you know, pretty much no one on the network.