Among the four major carriers in the US, the toughest competition, in terms of subscribers and network speeds, is between T-Mobile and Verizon. Both the carriers are always trying to outperform each other. However, a new ruling from the National Advertising Division or NAD may have given Verizon a slight edge over T-Mobile.

What is the ruling about?

T-Mobile has claimed in the past that its 4G Lte network speeds are greater than all other US carriers. This caused a dispute between the John Legere-led company and Verizon. The latter filed a complaint with NAD, which is a body that is in charge of reviewing all advertisements to determine if what is being shown to consumers is actually representative of the product in question.

In this case, the NAD was tasked with finding out whether the 4G LTE speeds offered by T-Mobile was really greater than what Verizon offered or not. Verizon claimed that T-Mobile acquired the network speed data from third-party apps such, as Ookla, which can be termed as crowdsourcing data. These speeds were then compared with the speeds offered by Verizon to its subscribers.

However, the Big Red claims that T-Mobile included the speeds of those Verizon subscribers who had already burned through their 22 GB monthly bandwidth limit. After this limit is crossed, Verizon throttles the speed for the customer and speed tests performed on such a line will not reflect the true speeds that Verizon offers.

The NAD declared that T-Mobile’s speed tests which presented the carrier as having the fastest 4G speeds were biased. So, T-Mobile cannot claim to have the network with the greatest speeds in any of their advertisements. The NAD ruling also made it clear that T-Mobile can also no longer claim to have a newer 4G LTE connection when compared to Verizon in its advertisements.

T-Mobile had dropped these ads as soon as Verizon had filed the complaint with NAD and now it seems will not be able to run them again.

Network coverage claims

Verizon had also filed a complaint against T-Mobile claiming that the latter’s assertion of covering 99.7 percent of the population that Verizon covered was false. However, the NAD said that it had found evidence to support that T-Mobile did cover the 99.7 percent population that Verizon covered.

However, this comparison was based on the population and not geographically.

This means that T-Mobile can continue claiming to cover 99.7 percent of the people as Verizon does in its ads, but it cannot depict a map of the entire United States to show the coverage. This is because the map indicates that T-Mobile covers 99.7 percent of the geographical area as Verizon does, which is not true. So, Verizon may perceive this as a form of victory in the war between it and T-Mobile.
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