Telecommunications company T-Mobile has quietly announced that its 5G network is live in 30 cities and is now waiting for compatible devices to become available.
In an interview with Light Reading, the operator confirmed it met the pledge made at the beginning of last year to bring 5G to 30 cities by the end of 2018. The rollout is complete from the network side, but commercial consumer service has not yet started because there are no widely available smartphones that support T-Mobile’s 5G implementation.
Several manufacturers, including Samsung and OnePlus, are expected to release 5G-capable phones early this year, which should enable consumers to access the newly deployed networks.
Earlier reporting noted that T-Mobile tempered expectations for 5G performance at launch. Karri Kuoppamaki, Vice President of Radio Network Technology at T-Mobile, emphasized that initial speeds are not the whole story, pointing to the evolution of LTE performance over time:
“Initially, we didn’t see gigabit speeds on LTE; we saw very low speeds.
Today we see much higher than that. It’s kind of irrelevant what [the speed] number is going to be on day one, as it will improve over time.”
T-Mobile has chosen to deploy 5G using the 600 MHz band to maximize coverage area, enabling service across greater distances from each cell site though at lower peak speeds compared with some other approaches. In contrast, competitors such as AT&T and Verizon are focusing on millimeter-wave spectrum that can deliver higher peak speeds but requires denser, smaller-cell deployments due to its shorter range. T-Mobile argues that relying on millimeter-wave-only deployments will present a scalability challenge for nationwide coverage across the continental United States.
After the initial rollout, T-Mobile plans to enhance capacity and peak performance by adding millimeter-wave spectrum to complement the broad-coverage 600 MHz layer.
At this time, the company has not specified whether the live 5G deployments cover entire cities or if they are limited to a few cell sites in each location.
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