#fastlte

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OpenSignal report via FierceWireless

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T-Mobile Test Drive

Back on 9/4/14 I posted about receiving my T-mobile Test Drive phone. It was an Apple iPhone 5S and here is the follow-up post about how it went. Initially I was worried about dropping and breaking the phone so I decided to slap my Otterbox on it and try and return it as soon as I was convinced one way or the other. I live in an area of Santa Clarita California in which coverage can be challenging with certain carriers. At that time I had Sprint and I needed to have the Sprint Airave to make calls in my house. Sprint was nice enough to send out the Airave at no cost. We also had a phone with Verizon in the past and I used to get dropped calls in the house. You can imagine I was quite skeptical about T-mobile since they rank 4th in size to the mother companies SAVE (Sprint, AT&T and VErizon). What I noticed immediately is the phone had 2-3 dots (bars as we used to call it in the "olden days") and LTE coverage in my home!!! After the shock wore off, I set the my phone to forward all calls to the Test Drive phone. Over the weekend and a couple of work days I tested the phone all over the Santa Clarita Valley, San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles. The call quality was good and I had few dropped or missed calls. I would say I had LTE coverage about 90% of the time, 4G coverage about 8% and E (Edge) about 2% of the time. The LTE speed was definitely fast and my apps requiring data or web pages loaded quickly. I was also able to send and receive SMS and MMS messages quickly. I did lose complete service once, however, this was deep in the bowels of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. After the 1st 1-2 days I was sure I was going to switch to T-mobile, however, I kept the phone until day 4 and decided I was pushing my luck because I was already convinced and hadn't dropped or damaged the phone. I was only going to switch my phone coming off contract from Sprint because I didn't want to deal with Sprint and the ETF issue for the 2nd phone (only 1 year into a Sprint contract), however, because I was still livid from Sprint giving me the run around about unlocking my iPhone 5 (see previous post) and because adding the 2nd line dropped the service from $50 for 1 phone to $80 for 2, I decided to take both my lines to T-mobile. There are no regrets on my part for making the switch, however, I would still recommend the Test Drive to anyone thinking of switching to be sure the service works where you live and work.