Last week Apple announced their annual update for iPhone, iPhone 6s and 6s Plus which will launch on September 25, with pre-orders that began this past weekend. Their iPhone devices received the expected general boosts in speed and performance from their biennial refinement cycle, the typical doubling of speed all around. But iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be significant upgrade to T-Mobile customers living in certain markets such as Washington DC, where the new generation of iPhone is likely to get significant signal improvements due to the inclusion of LTE band 12.
If you are a T-Mobile customer, you may have noticed that, particularly indoors, signal strength can suffer compared to our AT&T and Verizon compadres. This isn’t just because T-Mobile doesn’t have enough towers. A major factor is that AT&T and Verizon used to own all the lower cellular frequencies in the 700 MHz range. And just like low-frequency sound waves (like the ‘thump thump’ coming from your neighbor’s 2am party), low-frequency radio waves can go through solid objects such as trees and walls more easily. Rewind to 2008, remember the switch from analog television to digital? Better quality television was only a part of the reason for this upgrade. It was also so that we could more effectively distribute valuable yet underutilized television frequencies. So T-Mobile bought some of those frequencies to bolster their network. However, even though T-Mobile has invested an enormous amount of money into upgrading towers, only a few newer cell phone models could take advantage. iPhone’s 6s and 6s Plus are the first generation of Apple’s hardware that can talk with these new transmitters.
So if you are a T-Mobile customer, you may want to check out this map to see if it makes sense to take the plunge into the iPhone 6s generation A.S.A.P. Or if you have been hesitant to switch to T-Mobile because you have heard that their service is spotty you may want to take another look.