T-Mobile’s Update On Mid-Band 5G

In today’s press release from T-Mobile, the company claims that it has doubled the number of cities where it offers mid-band 5G service over the last month. The company expects to further expand mid-band, 5G coverage by the end of 2020:

Engineers are lighting up 1,000 sites per month with 2.5 GHz 5G and T-Mobile has plans to cover 100 million people with mid-band 5G by the end of the year.

While the press release involves an obnoxious amount of hype and marketing-speak, I think T-Mobile’s basic claim that mid-band service will bring consumers what they expect from 5G is more-or-less accurate. Low-band 5G doesn’t deliver speeds much better than what consumers are used to with LTE connections. Millimeter wave 5G coverage is still extremely sparse. With mid-band 5G, network operators can offer high speeds while still covering decent-sized areas.

For more information, see my page dedicated to T-Mobile’s 5G strategy.

5G abstract

T-Mobile Expands Mid-Band 5G

T-Mobile just launched mid-band 5G in a bunch of cities. Here’s the key bit from the press release:

T-Mobile lit up a supercharged 5G experience in another 121 cities and towns with mid-band 5G, delivering up to gigabit-per-second peak speeds and average download speeds around 300 megabits-per-second for capable 5G devices.

The expansion into mid-band 5G is exciting. While T-Mobile has been destroying its competitors in terms of 5G coverage, T-Mobile has relied mostly on slow, low-band 5G.

Twitter sweepstakes

In the press release, T-Mobile mentions a sweepstakes to encourage Twitter users to discuss T-Mobile’s 5G:

To celebrate, T-Mobile is giving away $100,000 on Twitter over the next several months, with #5Gsfor5G.

Interestingly, T-Mobile’s President of Technology, Neville Ray, criticized this sort of thing in a Tweet he shared the same day the sweepstakes launched: