T-Mobile has announced it will begin to roll out initial 5G coverage in 2019 using its 600 MHz spectrum band it recently acquired from a government auction.
The last few weeks have been buzzed with announcements about 5G coverage deployments with some less than stellar results. AT&T’s recent plan was lambasted as being factually wrong and its time table was completely off.
T-Mobile says it will use a portion of its $8 billion low-band 600 MHz spectrum to deliver 5G coverage for some areas beginning in 2019 with a planned rollout to cover the entire U.S. by 2020.
“5G will be amazing, and we can’t even imagine all the cool stuff it will bring, just like with our earlier network innovations,” says John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “The carriers are using 5G to either distract from how badly they’re losing today or to give their shareholders some hope they can compete with Big Cable. Their ambitious vision for fixed 5G to replace home internet will never provide mobile 5G coverage. It makes no sense.”
T-Mobile claims other carriers plan to use 5G like a series of hotspots in select cities with 5G coverage that will completely disappear once customers step outside these limited 5G zones. T-Mobile says it has enough high bandwidth to deliver 5G on a nationwide scale in the next two to three years.
“There’s no such thing as ‘5G spectrum,’ and in the next decade we’ll see everything moving to 5G,” says Neville Ray, T-Mobile CTO. “Nationwide Mobile 5G will require both high-band AND broad low-band coverage, and having unused nationwide 600 MHz spectrum means T-Mobile is in an ideal position to deliver.”
T-Mobile says that along with improved speeds for mobile devices, 5G will enable a new class of mobile applications and solutions that will be specifically tailored to take advantage of the high speeds 5G promises.
