As T-Mobile (NYSE:TMUS) continues on the company’s attack on its competitors, the company held its Uncarrier 7.0 event, representing the company’s next move to help consumers while sticking it to the company’s competitors. During the Uncarrier 7.0 event in San Francisco, the company’s CEO John Legere introduced a multitude of Wi-Fi enabled technologies that will help improve the quality of T-Mobile service.

As a part of Uncarrier 7.0, T-Mobile is going to be enabling Wi-Fi calling on all of the phones that they sell in store, which means that they very likely will not be carrying devices like the Nexus 5 in-store. Most Nexus 5 users will still be unable to make use of T-Moble’s Wi-Fi calling feature, even though it is quite awesome and enables you to make calls using Wi-Fi as if you were connected to a tower. This is perfect for areas with poor to no reception as well as to help improve call quality in areas like your home if you spend a lot of time in your home but still use your smartphone a lot. T-Mobile will also be creating a small JUMP window for any current T-Mobile customers that don’t have a T-Mobile branded device with Wi-Fi hotspot to enable to them to get one if they’d like (costs associated must still be paid). T-Mobile really wants people to leverage Wi-Fi connectivity more, especially when they have pretty decent home connections. They want to expand their network beyond just cell towers.

Part of that is T-Mobile will also be supplying, with a small deposit, home Wi-Fi hotspots. T-Mobile is calling these CellSpots but they’re really just home Wi-Fi networks dedicated for phone connectivity and use regular off-the-shelf ASUS routers with some custom firmware to give voice data priority over all over data. The CellSpots themselves use 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac wireless technology, so there’s nothing really special about them other than the fact that they’re technically free and will help you get better voice coverage in your home.

In addition to that, T-Mobile has also struck up a deal with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi service to deliver free texting and voicemail service on any GoGo enabled flights. Since calling is effectively banned on all airlines, T-Mobile is only enabling the ability to text your friends for free from 30,000 (or more) feet. While this may not be a huge factor for many, the reality is that GoGo’s Wi-Fi service only enabled internet chat and smartphone internet connectivity, but no text messaging or voicemail.

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Since most people’s contracts are usually 2 years long, you don’t usually see any significant movements of subscribers from one carrier to another. They happen slowly and quarterly, after all, it would take at least 8 quarters for a company to theoretically lose all of their subscribers if every single person wanted to leave. So, it comes as little surprise that Sprint still holds the numbers 3 spot in terms of subscribers when compared to T-Mobile. Based on T-Mobile’s last earnings call, they ended the first quarter of this year up 2.4 million with nearly 50 million customers, coming ever closer to Sprint’s 54 million. And if you take into consideration T-Mobile’s JUMP program and the millions of customers that are involved in that, it seems logical that T-Mobile would be buying more phones from manufacturers. Also, keep in mind that T-Mobile also offers a no-contract plan option and actually encourages a lot of users to buy their owns outright and just pay the base price of T-Mobile’s service.

According to Reuters, the fact that they had added more subscribers than any other carrier in the US significantly added to this overtaking of Sprint. T-Mobile bought 6 million smartphones in the first quarter of this year while Sprint only bought 5 million, according to Neil Shah of Counterpoint Technology Market Research. There wasn’t much other useful information from Reuters or Neil Shah in the article, although one can surmise that if a carrier is ordering more phones than their larger competitor that they’re clearly doing more business ans signing up more customers for plans. And now that T-Mobile is selling more phones than Sprint, its merely a matter of time until they surpass Sprint in subscribers as well. However, that might change if the T-Mobile-Sprint merger/acquisition is approved by the DoJ and FTC.

This is also possibly because T-Mobile is also a leader in technology, adopting certain technologies like VoLTE ahead of their competitors, especially Sprint who has yet to deploy enough of an LTE network to even consider the idea of VoLTE. T-Mobile is also vastly faster and cheaper than Sprint in a lot of scenarios so, I have a feeling that a lot of T-Mobile’s customers are AT&T and Sprint customers, which could be why Softbank, Sprint’s parent, want to buy them.

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