T-Mobile's launch of low-band, standalone 5G has expanded the carrier's rural coverage, but speeds are slower than the rest of its 5G network, according to a new study from network analysis firm OpenSignal.
This is all stuff we could have predicted, but we hadn't yet seen any testing data. It's nice to see assumptions followed up by numbers. T-Mobile uses its lowest-frequency, longest-distance airwaves for rural 5G. They're in the 600MHz band, the old TV channels 14-51. Using the initial "non standalone" system, 5G phones had to first hook up to a mid-band 4G connection on the 1700MHz band, a somewhat shorter-distance band that limited the reach of the 600MHz network. On the other hand, combining 4G and 5G channels improves speed and performance.
Strip away the 4G requirement to go to "standalone" 5G, and the rural 5G signal can reach farther, but it doesn't have the speed that it would have if 4G was added. It does have lower latency, though, which is an advantage of the 5G encoding.
“Standalone 5G brings immediate benefits to customers by increasing coverage and improving network response times. And it lays the foundation for 5G’s true potential in the future, making groundbreaking applications like self-driving vehicles, supercharged IoT, real-time translation and more possible," says Neville Ray, President of Technology at T-Mobile. "Only T-Mobile 5G is truly ready to bring massive innovation and transformative experiences to businesses and consumers across the country."
According to OpenSignal's testing, after T-Mobile launched standalone 5G, its 5G availability in urban areas improved from 26.9% to 31.5%, but availability in rural areas jumped from 24.5% to 33.3%. Looking purely at standalone 5G usage, urban areas went from 3.7% at launch to 14.7% after five months, while rural areas went from 5.9% to 26.6%.
Rural users saw even more benefit from this expansion than those numbers show, because while T-Mobile generally already had coverage in those urban areas, some of those rural areas are seeing T-Mobile coverage for the first time.
That's at the cost of speed, though. Standalone connections averaged 30Mbps while non-standalone connections averaged 53.4Mbps, as you'd expect from "just one channel" versus "a bunch of channels added to each other." This continues to make 5G hard to sell to American consumers when the 5G experience is relatively slow. We've been seeing this problem with Verizon's nationwide 5G network as well.
What About Rural Home Internet?
T-Mobile could have installed 4G on its 600MHz band and seen similar coverage improvements. So why bother with 5G? It's not yet bringing any real advantages to consumers over 4G on the same band, except for slightly lower latency.
I think this is may end up having to do with enterprise and farming uses: the boring but important stuff that drives rural economies. Standalone 5G will let T-Mobile sell sliced network capacity for massive networks of agricultural sensors or automated mining vehicles. That won't help readers raging about the quality of their home internet, but it will let major employers drive more profits to their shareholders.
T-Mobile does have a rural home internet plan, but it doesn't necessarily involve standalone 600MHz networks. Rather, it's building out more of its "ultra capacity" 2.5GHz network to more places, although that involves more towers for a shorter-range, higher-capacity network. T-Mobile said it wants to have 9.5 million home internet customers by 2024.