T-Mobile USA’s senior vice president of B2B services Frank Sickinger shared some LTE-related numbers and had some interesting things to say in a recent interview about the carrier’s upcoming LTE rollout in the United States.

It’s well known among mobile watchers that T-Mobile will be the last major U.S. carrier to rollout an LTE network. The popular opinion is that T-Mobile has fallen behind other carriers when it comes to LTE. Sickinger, not surprisingly, begs to differ.

For T-Mobile, “it’s not just about having [an] LTE [network], it’s about building a massive LTE footprint,” Sickinger says. “We already have sites that are lit up with LTE. But for us it’s about having the entire network modernized [before launch]. That’s not always the case with the competition.”

T-Mobile’s wireless evolution from EDGE technology to HSPA and eventually HSPA+ has been a long and laborious process, but the carrier is just about ready to rollout LTE across America. Following a breakup of the proposed T-Mobile/AT&T merger in late 2011, T-Mobile was able to secure significant new spectrum from AT&T, according to Sickinger, which helped it expand the overall network and boost the HSPA+ coverage.

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