T-Mobile's latest pitch: Better coverage maps

NEW YORK — The major wireless carriers spend a bundle on advertising to convince you they have the best network or the widest coverage. What they don't usually brag about is the coverage map itself.

T-Mobile is about to do so. On Monday, the self-proclaimed "Un-carrier" unveiled what it says is the industry's first and only "customer-verified" network coverage map.

What exactly does that mean? T-Mobile's chief technology officer Neville Ray explains that the carriers have been basing network maps on "predictive coverage estimations." Now he says there are more advanced technologies for determining coverage — notably actual customer data.

T-Mobile's new maps are based on more than 200 million daily data points collected about customer experiences on the company's network, or about 15 billion data points collected so far, a figure that will grow.

"Invariably customers find that the experience when they get out to the location where they need service is not what was portrayed on the map," Ray told me in an interview.

Customers will be able to drill down to granular levels on the map to see if coverage is available and in many cases what kinds of speeds are available. T-Mobile has broken down the U.S. population into 980 million "bins" of about 100 meters by 100 meters each. So you might be able to get a good read on what kind of service you'll have where you live or work, right down to your block.

"We're trying to leverage this crowdsourced data," Ray says. "There's a massive amount of information flowing around on these networks about where coverage is good, bad or indifferent and where speeds are good, bad or indifferent. And we're going to put all of that information out on the Web in a completely transparent way. It'll be a cold day in hell before the Big 2 (AT&T and Verizon) do this."

T-Mobile plans to validate and augment its own additional real-time customer usage data from trusted third-party sources, including from Inrix, a Big Data collection company.

"What we're trying to do now is expose what we believe is really important for the customer around that buying decision on coverage," Ray says.

Ray acknowledges that T-Mobile's own coverage shortcomings will be exposed. "We're not trying to hoodwink people."

For now, you can enter your street address, ZIP code, town or just play around on the map. But we're not at the point where yet you'll be able to say, "what is coverage going to be like in this area at 4 p.m."

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter