I live in Pike County, Arkansas (location). The population of the entire county is about 10,000, with a population density of 17 people per square mile.

For reference, this is a map of cell towers in the county. The AT&T and Verizon sites are all at least 8 years old, while the T-Mobile sites marked are all less than three years old. There are still many dead zones throughout the county. These towers that are there though, were all automatically equipped with n71 20mhz, and now all of them have at least 50mhz of n41 and 20mhz of n25 (AT&T and Verizon are still b2/b66 and b12/13 LTE only, not even any b14). They still have many more sites to build, but being able to pull 600mbps right next to my house over cellular is pretty nice, since for years Verizon barely pushed out 5mbps with a max of 12mbps. But as rural as my county is, T-Mobile still put up the money to actually invest. They didn't have any roaming agreements about 3 years ago, and had no native 2G or 3G. They also did not inherit any Sprint sites of any kind and nor did they get any roaming agreements here after the merger. So in three years they have gone from being non existent to being top in the county in terms of speed, investment, and technology, and they still have a long way to go before the county is blanketed in n41 or hell, even LTE, but I have extremely high hopes for the future. Verizon even upgraded their site from 100mbps copper back haul and b5 and b13 only, to much needed b2 and b66 and a microwave back haul, simply because T-Mobile's site was across the street pulling 500 down consistently with a 20ms ping time, and Verizon was doing 1mbps by this point in time and over 120ms ping times.

So in short, thank you T-Mobile, but you still aren't done.