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T-Mobile's John Legere finds a way to knock Sprint in Google Project Fi announcement

T-Mobile's John Legere finds a way to knock Sprint in Google Project Fi announcement

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Press releases are flying from Google, Motorola, and T-Mobile in the wake of Google's Project Fi announcement this afternoon — a wireless service that could completely upend the way data is sold, if it's successful. T-Mobile CEO John Legere, a man who is never at a loss for words, also published a blog post of his own.

Overall, the post is very PR-friendly — he praises Google and the relationship that he's established with them in the process of working on Fi, even though it would seem to threaten T-Mobile's own revenue with an unusually aggressive business model. But this paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Since the cellular connection will be made based on network speed, we expect to capture the largest share of traffic coming from Project Fi customers - and chances are good that these customers are going to be riding on America's fastest nationwide 4G LTE network. The T-Mobile Data StrongTM network! If Project Fi customers are anything like our own, we expect they'll be data-hungry!

Legere has never shied away from giving his competitors grief, and Sprint has been a frequent target of his vitriol in recent months. Even though Project Fi is using both T-Mobile and Sprint, Legere manages to slide in a little Sprint dig here, too, suggesting that the network is too slow. (Fi automatically selects the faster connection, as Legere mentions.)

Of course, to end users of Fi, none of this back-and-forth really matters — they'll be customers of Google, not of T-Mobile or Sprint. As long as the connection is automatically managed, they won't care who's providing the data — as long as it's fast, cheap, and reliable.