Verizon screwed themselves by not participating seriously in any of the spectrum auctions prior to the big chunk of C-Band they bought which they are in the process of rolling out. AT&T now covers more land area than any other carrier, and T-Mobile is way ahead of them in terms of mid-band 5G deployment. Verizon bet on mmWave 5G which is nice, but doesn't travel and is only really useful in big metros and stadiums. Their mid-band (C-Band) which they bought ~200mhz on average for most areas is in the process of being deployed, but it doesn't travel as far as they expected, so it's going to take quite a bit of time deploying more cell sites (whether towers or buildings) to densify their network.
All of this is happening while they continue to hope their customers just put up with their congested wireless network by trying to ride of their old reputation of being the "best" while they jack up their plan prices for a network that is getting worse.
Damn, their strategy of relying on the inertia of their reputation is working just fine, I just switched to them from fine-but-not-spectacular AT&T when I needed to add on a couple new phone lines. The price was about the same, and so far to me network performance seems better, but probably a lot of that is just placebo effect.
Is t-mobile actually usable now? I’ve tried them 2-3 times over the last decade and urban performance was generally acceptable (though even then with weird dead zones that made it tough to use) but it would always quickly fall over any time I was beyond suburban areas.
All of this is happening while they continue to hope their customers just put up with their congested wireless network by trying to ride of their old reputation of being the "best" while they jack up their plan prices for a network that is getting worse.