T-Mobile intends to triple the square mileage covered by its "ultra capacity" mid-band 5G network this year, President of Technology Neville Ray said at a Morgan Stanley conference today.
"We did 3x last year, and we have to do 3x again to get to that 260" million people covered, which the company has promised for the end of 2022, Ray said.
The massive expansion in terms of square mileage will serve the 40% of the US that is "small markets and rural areas," he said. But it's a big lift, with a lot of big cell sites.
"We're going to have materially more macro-cell sites than our competition," Ray said. "This is a macro build, with large volumes of macro sites."
T-Mobile's expansion into rural areas has already started to pay off, T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik said. A third of the company's net new accounts are coming from rural areas, he said.
T-Mobile's mid-band 5G is much more widely supported by phones than the forms of 5G used by AT&T and Verizon. That's put the company at close to half of its traffic on 5G now, and over 40% of postpaid smartphones on 5G, Ray said.
Two Americas, One More Difficult to Cover
T-Mobile's 3x square-mileage plans show a well-known fact in the mobile industry: It gets progressively harder to cover the same number of people as you get outside the largest metro areas.
Recently, Dish announced its first 125 cities and towns for its 5G network. That company is required to cover 20% of the US population by June. But the total population of the 125 named cities on Dish's list, as of 2019, is only around 27 million people—about 13% of the population. (Dish is probably saying city names when it means metro areas, which is how it gets to 20%.)
The 10 biggest US cities by population have almost the same population as the 125 places on Dish's list—26 million people. Or, to take another view, the city of Houston alone (pop. 2.3 million) has more people in it than 15 states. You could cover Houston alone, or you could cover a swathe of states from Idaho to Nebraska, and you'd have the same population coverage.
To access T-Mobile's broader coverage, you'll need a T-Mobile 5G device that supports both low-band and mid-band frequencies. To check those out, see our Best T-Mobile Phones roundup.