T-Mobile won our Fastest Mobile Network award this year thanks to its speedy mid-band 5G network, which now covers more than 185 million people. Now, the carrier is making two big moves over the next year to expand coverage and bandwidth.
Mid-band coverage will expand by pairing it with low-band for uplink, says Neville Ray, T-Mobile's president of technology. Because uploading relies on the tiny transmitter in your phone, it's more of a coverage limitation than downloading. Putting uploads on a low-frequency channel helps phones stay connected further out, and they're still able to make fast downloads on the mid-band frequency.
"Low-band aggregation on uplink with 2.5GHz is super exciting," Ray says. "Why the other guys aren't talking about that on C-band is beyond me. They said they don't need it; 'are you guys nuts?' That mid-band/low-band aggregation is going to expand our reach, improve cell edges, in-building penetration—all these things just get better."
5G carrier aggregation is a purely software feature, and T-Mobile is working on the base-station software with Nokia and Ericsson, and on the handset software with manufacturers. "The majority of recent devices are n41/n71 capable with an MR" over-the-air software update, he says. "Those MRs are being lined up, and some will come in Q4."
Not Just Better Coverage, Faster Speeds
So we're going to see better mid-band coverage next year. Better speed and capacity will come too, in part from Qualcomm's upcoming X65 modems, which support mid-band 5G channels twice as wide as previous models.
"There's a false ceiling at 100MHz, but that changes again in Q1 of next year. As we go into 2022, that 100 ceiling on a single carrier starts to expand up, first to 140, and ultimately you'll go up to 200," he says. The primary limiting factor on T-Mobile's available mid-band isn't how much spectrum it owns, but how much is still being used for Sprint LTE, and that will decline with time.
That puts T-Mobile in a strong position against AT&T and Verizon even after they turn on their C-band mid-band systems next year, Ray asserts.
"All Verizon has is 60MHz of C-band, AT&T 40," Ray says. "They're stuck on that 60MHz for all of '22 and all of '23. We'll be going past 100MHz, and at the end of '23 we'll be at 200MHz. There's no way we're looking to fall behind what Verizon can do."
Ray also pushed back on the idea that AT&T and Verizon's owned fiber networks give them an advantage. Here in New York, there's been some criticism among network-watching types that T-Mobile's 80MHz of 5G isn't living up to expectations. I've gotten speeds up to around 600Mbps here in Queens, which falls short of what 80MHz could provide. According to Ookla Speedtest Intelligence, T-Mobile is delivering its fastest speeds around here, mostly in Midtown and downtown Manhattan. Is the problem backhaul?
"Folks are worried that they can't get above 600 or 700Mbps on their devices?" Ray laughs. T-Mobile has already upgraded most major-metro backhaul to 10 gigs per site and it's now working on making deals in suburban and rural areas, he says. While T-Mobile does have to lease more than 90% of its backhaul, Verizon and AT&T also lease about two-thirds of theirs, he points out. While Verizon shows speeds well over 3Gbps on some of its millimeter-wave sites, Ray notes those sites are only a very small percentage of Verizon's overall network.
"In some areas, they go through the same things we do," he says. But they haven't turned on mid-band yet, so they may not have hit those broader ceilings. We'll see next year.