T-Mobile will stop claiming its the fastest 4G LTE network

Way back in August 2016, T-Mobile performed a speed test using third-party sites Ookla and OpenSignal to determine which network is the fastest of them all. These results indicated that T-Mobile is the fastest, which the company has adopted in its advertising on its site and in real locations across the United States for more than a year now.

However, T-Mobile has agreed to stop this advertising campaign after a complaint from Verizon with the National Advertising Division. T-Mobile will discontinue claims that it has the fastest 4G LTE network and that its LTE network is newer than Verizon’s.

Verizon filed the complaint with NAD, which is a self-regulatory board that’s designed to help advertisers settle disputes without lengthy court battles or government regulations. Verizon says that the period of time in which T-Mobile conducted these tests was done when Verizon introduced its unlimited plans and that some Verizon users could have been throttled and could have experienced slower speeds because of deprioritization.

T-Mobile says it will comply with NAD’s recommendation, but that it won’t rely on the data for the month that Verizon filed the dispute over. A spokesperson for T-Mobile says that despite Verizon’s complaints, they still believe they’re the fastest LTE network.

“We did say we’d comply with NAD’s recommendation, and we will, but that means we won’t rely solely on the specific data we submitted. We have taken the NAD’s concerns into consideration and are confident we have robust data that addresses them and proves, once again, that we have the fastest LTE network.”

The agreement between Verizon and T-Mobile doesn’t prevent T-Mobile from making these claims about a different set of data, so it will be up to Verizon to challenge those claims once they’ve been made.