John Legere
T-Mobile CEO John Legere at the GeekWire Summit 2014.

In what’s becoming an annual tradition, T-Mobile CEO John Legere today made some bold predictions for the new year. However, there’s a new twist this year when it comes to his take on T-Mobile’s competition.

Legere, who frequently lambasts fellow U.S. wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in public, this time put a special emphasis on the top dog, Verizon, the nation’s leading carrier in terms of subscribers — suggesting that he’s setting his sights higher after T-Mobile finally surpassed Sprint in 2015 to become the nation’s No. 3 wireless carrier.

The T-Mobile CEO dedicated six paragraphs to “Big Red,” predicting that “Verizon will get more and more panicked – now that our network is going head-to-head with them nearly everywhere.” He accuses Verizon of copying T-Mobile’s Carrier Freedom deal and says the company’s PR folks now attack him on Twitter.

“Now they’re even running ads focused on T-Mobile, targeting all the customers they’ve lost to us,” Legere adds.

More from Legere:

Seriously.  Look at the year they’ve had….  They hike activation fees, roll out perma-cookies, increase rates on grandfathered customers, fine customers more than a billion in overage penalties, hit one poor couple with a $2 million bill, spend billions launching Go90 (the video service no one wants or asked for) … and then spend billions in advertising telling us “better matters.” How tone deaf can you get? These guys still just don’t get it.

In its most recent earnings report, the Bellevue-based company said it added 2.3 million customers in the past quarter to bring its total to more than 61.2 million customers. However, the companyis still far behind AT&T and Verizon — the “Duopoly,” as Legere calls them. Legere also claimed today that T-Mobile has “basically pulled even with Verizon on LTE coverage, now reaching 304 million people with the nation’s fastest LTE network.”

You can read all of Legere’s predictions here. We’ve contacted Verizon for comment.

Update: Here’s Verizon’s statement:

There is a big difference between network coverage and network quality. Verizon Wireless passed the 300 million LTE-pops-covered two-and-a-half-years ago – so it’s logical that we wouldn’t need to grow coverage as much as a third-tier carrier – but we didn’t just stop working at that point to improve for our customers. Since then, on top of our award-winning LTE network we’ve added XLTE coverage in nearly 450 markets, using the highest quality wireless spectrum and doubling the VZW network’s speed and capacity. We’ve also led the industry in deploying small-cell technology, installing Distributed Antennae Systems in venues, stadiums and throughout some of the most iconic buildings in the country. And it’s worth noting that most respected, impartial companies – such as RootMetrics – who measure network performance broadly via specialized testing equipment rate the Verizon Wireless network as fastest and most reliable more often than any competitor.

So we’ll just keep working to provide our customers with an even better network experience, and will speak to the facts of what we’ve actually accomplished, not what we hope to do.

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