T-Mobile’s 5G Speed Claims Don’t Jibe With Reality

T-Mobile US is closing the first week of 2021 with a low-band 5G network that covers 280 million people and a mid-band 5G network that covers 106 million people. The operator’s leadership team, speaking at an investor conference this week, said its 5G network running on 2.5 GHz spectrum will reach 200 million people by the end of the year. T-Mobile US is closing the first week of 2021 with a low-band 5G network that covers 280 million people and a mid-band 5G network that covers 106 million people. The operator’s leadership team, speaking at an investor conference this week, said its 5G network running on 2.5 GHz spectrum will reach 200 million people by the end of the year. “The world’s crazy this year and there’s so much headwinds and tailwinds, but T-Mobile is persisting, we’re outgrowing everyone in this industry consistently,” CEO Mike Sievert said at the Citi 2021 Global TMT West Conference.  “We smashed our 2020 network goals,” he said. “Not only do we have 280  million people covered by 5G — more than four times the square mileage of Verizon — but in addition, the highest capacity variant of 5G that we call Ultra Capacity 5G, now 106 million people covered, on our way to 200 million by the end of this year.” The operator’s low-band 5G network spans 1.6 million square miles. “That’s a million square miles more than either AT&T or Verizon,” Neville Ray, the carrier’s president of technology, said at the event. Ray also claimed that download speeds on T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G network are approaching 300 Mb/s while 4G LTE is in the range of 40 Mb/s. Moreover, he said “the speeds on that 5G layer across that 280 million pops are about double our LTE averages in the industry to date.” However, that level of performance isn’t experienced by all T-Mobile customers. A speed test conducted on an iPhone 12 Pro in Long Beach, California, at the time of this writing retrieved a download speed of 0.85 Mb/s on T-Mobile’s 5G network. A follow-up test immediately after that on T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network generated a download speed of 47.5 Mb/s.  Ray criticized T-Mobile’s competitors for delivering 5G speeds lower than their respective 4G LTE networks, but T-Mobile’s 5G network suffers from the same lackluster performance in many locations. “We’re providing a tremendous uplift, a really generational shift in experience and performance with that mid-band layer on top of that great 5G coverage layer that we push out” more broadly, Ray added.  The operator’s executive team also continued to hammer competitors for a significantly slower pace of 5G deployments. “Verizon, in the entire two years that they’ve been at this, have managed to accomplish [2 million pops covered by its high-capacity 5G network],” Sievert said. “Just do the math, that means in 2021 we will do more covered pops on Ultra Capacity 5G per week than Verizon has done in the entire two years they’ve been at this. That’s where we are. That’s the advantage of our model. That’s network leadership that translates to real advantages for enterprises and consumers.” T-Mobile’s multi-year $40 billion network upgrade will also, eventually, allow the operator to decommission legacy Sprint network sites, but that effort won’t get underway in earnest until its 5G network is fully built, capacity reaches goals set by the operator, and all Sprint customers are migrated to T-Mobile’s anchor network, Ray said. He added that the entire process would take several years. “When we’re building and upgrading these sites and adding that wonderful 2.5 GHz spectrum to these sites, we’re also adding LTE as well as 5G. And so that’s building the capacity that we need to support that customer migration” from Sprint’s legacy network, he added.  In the interim, T-Mobile continues to move former Sprint customer traffic onto its network. The carrier said about 15% of legacy Sprint traffic was on T-Mobile’s network at the end of September and it’s since expanded that to more than 20%. “If you look at customers that were legacy Sprint that now spend the majority of their time, the vast majority of their time, on the T-Mobile network, that number is now just north of 4 million customers,” Ray said.  He said he and his team are also on pace to continue upgrading 1,000 mid-band 5G sites per week in 2021 and 2022. “We have built a supply chain with the resources, with the capabilities, all of the engineering, all of the radio gear, everything we need. We worked steadily through 2020 to build that ramp, and that pace, and that capability so we can move into 2021 and just start hitting this thing.” T-Mobile hasn’t shared details about its plans for its much smaller 5G network running on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, but Ray previously described it as something best reserved for the final stages of a 5G network deployment. The 5G project, which Ray refers to as a “network factory,” is another area where T-Mobile lobs criticism at its competitors, claiming AT&T and Verizon haven’t achieved the same level of efficiency and repeatability at scale to date.  Sievert also pointed to IoT, rural areas, and enterprise as key growth opportunities for T-Mobile. Rural areas, where roughly one-third of the country’s population lives, is “significantly underrepresented” by T-Mobile “because of our historic position on network and brand, and now we have an opportunity,” he said, adding that T-Mobile intends to be the growth leader in the U.S. wireless market.  “In order to do that we have to be able to go successfully penetrate places where we’ve historically lagged, defend our strengths, and that means we have to have an incredible value proposition,” Sievert said. “That’s why it’s so important that we are able to simultaneously be the value leader in this industry and increasingly the network leader at the same time. No one’s ever been able to do those things.” 5G also “offers a potential superior solution and it’s playing right into the trends that enterprises have been chasing for years,” he said. “You’ve seen so many things go through a [software-as-a-service] transformation and networks can do the same.” 5G will kick off in the enterprise space with “extreme use cases” like robotics and factories, but corporate campuses will also eventually move to 5G for connectivity, Sievert said.  IoT “is one of those overused buzzwords and the sky’s not going to be raining with 5G devices any time soon. But that being said, the technology trends are very clear, which is low-cost modules with fantastic battery life, ultra-high capacity, these are things that open up innovation opportunities that weren’t here in the prior era,” he added.  “Our job is to build a high-capacity network that’s very friendly to hardware and software innovators so that they can do their thing,” Sievert said. “5G brings along all those opportunities. Our job is to be developer friendly.”