T-Mobile, Where Being #1 Means Being Newest Item On A List
Boom, indeed.
Over the weekend, T-Mobile CEO John Legere apparently skimmed over this CNET article on the “Top five home routers for Wi-Fi Calling,” saw that his company’s Personal CellSpot router was at the top of that list and declared his company the winner in the Tweet shown above.
But, as some tried to point out to Mr. Legere, he must have skipped over the part where the CNET article clearly states, “These routers are listed in the order in which they were reviewed, with the most recent review first.”
While the CNET article does say nice things about the router, there is nothing to indicate that it’s the best of the bunch. The author doesn’t even put a “1” next to the item in the story.
This is at least the second time in two months that T-Mobile has exaggerated a story from CNET. In early August, the company sent out a press release claiming that a CNET test of 4G LTE data speeds proved that T-Mobile held “the undisputed title of America’s fastest nationwide 4G LTE network,” even though it actually came in a close second to AT&T on both upload and download speeds.
What’s so irritating about these exaggerations is that, once again, they aren’t necessary. Rather than quote the CNET article where it states that the T-Mobile device is a “top-tier router with great features and excellent Wi-Fi performance,” Legere goes for the cheap “We’re #1.”
And Legere could have cheered about how his company, which barely had a 4G network a couple years ago, now has an LTE network that is just as fast as competitors with several times the number of users and significantly more resources at their disposal. Instead, T-Mobile chose to claim that it was the fastest, as if saying it enough times will just make it the truth.
We want T-Mobile to succeed, and we often appreciate Legere’s brashness when it comes to staring down his much bigger opponents. But saying you’ve won a race when no one else was running is just bad form.
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