Flamboyant and outspoken T-Mobile CEO Mr. John Legere has an opinion on most things and he isn't afraid of expressing them. While some of his observations are much-appreciated by customers who are tired of hearing the same old tried and tested ambiguous rhetoric from the top management of most companies, some of his other comments, like his recent outburst against the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) becomes mired in controversy for reasons not too difficult to fathom. Now there's a new demon in town that the man wants to slay, and that happens to be wireless network performance analysis company RootMetrics, which is headquartered in the same city as T-Mobile – Bellevue, WA. On Thursday, RootMetrics released its latest 'RootScore' report covering the second half of last year, which declared Verizon to be the best performing wireless carrier in the US – yet again.

That apparently did not sit well with Mr. Legere and true to his style, he let everyone know that he was having none of it. Actually, even before RootMetrics had officially announced its results, the T-Mobile CEO released a prepared statement, saying that RootMetrics "should be banned as an independent source for network benchmarking, period!" As for the reason for his demand, he said that the company had "manipulated their testing of the T-Mobile network, choosing to turn OFF Voice over LTE, our network technology that is on every single phone we sell". Mr. Legere also drew attention to an earlier post by his colleague and T-Mobile CTO Mr. Ray Neville, which claimed that the methodology employed by RootMetrics is 'flawed' and hence its data, untrustworthy.


Mr. Legere also leveled some serious allegations against RootMetrics by saying that T-Mobile will probably need to pay off the company "like other carriers do to get them to stop deliberately turning off significant portions of our network and skewing results during their drive tests". The report though, is not all negative on T-Mobile, seeing as the carrier has been praised for its "outstanding data speeds in most metro areas" during the period under consideration, with the median download speeds in Lansing, Michigan clocking as high as 44.9 Mbps – the highest median speeds recorded in any metro area. RootMetrics is yet to come out with an official response to Mr. Legere's outburst, so it will be interesting to see how this controversy eventually pans out.