T-Mo claims ‘Finest Community’ crown from Ookla

T-Mo touts its towers, spectrum place and tech as enabling Finest Community win

T-Cell US credited its spectrum place, 5G Standalone roll-out and its tower rely as the explanations for its community enhancements which have been years within the making, most just lately confirmed with Ookla’s Finest Community award.

CEO Mike Sievert, talking from an occasion at T-Cell’s 5G Hub this week, referred to as Ookla’s work the “most exhaustive community take a look at in U.S. historical past,” involving six months of testing throughout the fourth quarter of 2024 and first quarter of 2025, gathering half a billion knowledge factors throughout tens of millions of gadgets and assessing quite a few features of the shopper expertise as a way to declare a Finest Community winner.

For these unfamiliar with the ins and outs of community testing, Sievert took a little bit of time to distinguish between the kind of crowd-sourced, app-based testing that Ookla carried out, and drive-test-based community evaluations.

“Drive checks have a look at 50 customers. 50 customers, driving round in vehicles. In truth, drive checks are sometimes sponsored by the carriers, and they also’re driving round in vehicles … in a approach that’s per the provider’s expectations,” Sievert instructed the gang on the 5G Hub. “So clearly these items are very, very totally different.”

He continued: “I don’t wish to low cost drive checks an excessive amount of, they’ve a task. We have a look at the information. It’s essential knowledge for any operator to grasp weak spots, easy methods to tune up the community, the place are dropped calls taking place. Drive checks have a task. They’re essential. However they don’t seem to be a complete approach, throughout each nook of this nation, to find out who’s the most effective community. And that’s what we’re claiming at present, on the heels of the biggest take a look at ever.”

COO Srini Gopalan stated that because of the community density that T-Cell US has, plus its spectrum holdings and its community expertise decisions, T-Cell US has a community lead of “ two years” on Verizon and AT&T. “That lead is barely going to develop. That is solely going to get higher,” he added.

Whereas T-Cell US has emphasised its “layer cake” spectrum strategy for years, Gopalan identified that throughout the totally different spectrum sorts, T-Cell US has put collectively a very advantageous spectrum place—not solely within the quantity of spectrum that it has, however within the relative place of its holdings in comparison with different operators. Within the low-band airwaves, for instance, T-Cell US has 600 MHz in comparison with different carriers’ 700 MHz and 850 MHz. Within the midband, it purchased Dash’s wealth of two.5 GHz, whereas AT&T and Verizon are counting on the C-Band spectrum at 3.7 GHz.

T-Mo additionally spotlighted its T-Satellite tv for pc Non-Terrestrial Community (NTN) service in partnership with LEO supplier Starlink, which has been in beta mode since early this yr however will formally change to a business service as of July 23. Learn extra particulars on the teachings realized from the beta service right here.

In different take a look at information:

–Spirent Communications has launched a new take a look at platform, its Landslide E20 Over-the-Air (OTA) resolution that automates interactions with handsets within the lab. The corporate stated that the Landslide E20 is the one providing of its variety that provides carrier-grade automation and visibility into precise handset habits, whereas additionally being scalable to help “a whole bunch of gadgets concurrently.”

The platform’s options embrace customizable scripting and distant consumer interface management, lifelike multi-app utilization like having the ability to have video streaming and voice calls run concurrently, help for twin SIM eventualities and API/SDK-based automation that’s proof against UI modifications, in accordance with Spirent.

“Ongoing evolution of 5G, Wi-Fi offload methods, and new handset and OS releases demand an automatic, repeatable strategy to testing in lifelike situations,” stated Anil Kollipara, VP of product administration at Spirent. “Our Landslide E20 OTA resolution delivers full-stack visibility and real-world accuracy, validating providers below true consumer situations. This platform uncovers efficiency points others miss, with scalable testing throughout gadgets, OS updates, and mobility eventualities.”

–Viavi Options’ distant fiber take a look at system (RFTS) notched a buyer win with “different community” or alt-net supplier Netomnia, the second-largest alt-net working within the U.Ok. Netomnia will use Viavi’s ONMSi RFTS to streamline its community set up in addition to to help ongoing upkeep.

Together with fellow alt-net suppliers YouFibre and brsk, Netomnia has 325,000 related premises and a pair of.5 million serviceable places, with a goal of 5 million serviceable places by the tip of 2027. Netomnia will use Viavi’s ONMSi RFTS to streamline its community set up in addition to to help ongoing upkeep. In accordance with Viavi, the community operator will probably be utilizing a cellular app to make use of the answer’s distant test-on-demand functionality for end-to-end-certification testing because the community is constructed out.

Netomnia will use a cellular app to leverage the ONMSi distant test-on-demand functionality to carry out end-to-end certification testing through the construct levels. As well as, utilizing reflector-less options, community well being and efficiency will probably be monitored all over the premises’ optical community terminals (ONTs).

“The distant fiber take a look at system is a vital factor in enabling us to succeed in our formidable objective to deploy a high-quality community masking 5 million premises and over 150 exchanges by the tip of 2027,” stated Jeremy Chelot, Group CEO for Netomnia, YouFibre and brsk.

–Liquid Devices has launched the fourth-generation of its reconfigurable {hardware} platform, Moku:Delta. The software-defined instrument has 15 built-in instrument capabilities, together with spectrum evaluation, waveform era and an oscilloscope, with eight unbiased enter and output channels to run devices concurrently, and help for 32 unbiased digital I/O channels.

Liquid Devices stated that the platform can help greater than 2 billion attainable instrument configurations and is well-suited for quantum experiments, aerospace and protection functions and semiconductor design.

-Testing and certification large Bureau Veritas is reorganizing its inside constructions as a part of its Leap | 28 technique. It is going to fold its present six geographic working areas into 4: the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific and Center East Caspian & Africa.

The corporate’s product strains will probably be managed below three areas throughout these areas: Industrials and Commodities, Urbanization and Assurance and Shopper Merchandise Companies, with every space managed by an govt committee member.

“This new group will leverage scale, profit from a well-defined construction, thus rushing up determination making, efficiency impression, and innovation,” stated Bureau Veritas CEO Hinda Gharbi.

-Check home Intertek is now providing what it says is the world’s first unbiased end-to-end AI assurance program, dubbed Intertek AI². This system is predicated on inspecting AI by way of the lenses of governance, transparency, safety and security.