T-Mobile has a year to cement its position as the leading 5G carrier in the US. If it wants to do so, it's going to have to move fast, be sure, and make no mistakes.
This week I tested T-Mobile's first 5G hotspot and a bunch of new T-Mobile phones (reviews coming soon). The carrier's Inseego M2000 hotspot works beautifully and, by far, has the nation's best 5G hotspot plan at $50 for 100GB. T-Mobile is offering the first truly unthrottled nationwide 5G service plan, with Magenta MAX. It's clear that at this moment, in urban areas at least, T-Mobile has a chance to define itself as the only carrier actually building and selling 5G right.
Next week we're going to see the OnePlus 9 series launch, and I expect T-Mobile to take center stage with those buzzy phones, maybe even with an exclusive on them. OnePlus has been trickling out details, including 50-watt hyper-fast wireless charging and a radical new power-efficient display.
But the clock is ticking. Verizon's threatening to drop a C-band bomb on 46 major metro areas by next March. T-Mobile has to move fast, strike hard, and quickly convince a lot of people that its mid-band 5G coverage is for real, overcoming years of negative network perception.
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In rural areas, nobody is doing 5G right at the moment. At best they're building something that works like 4G but has a '5G' sticker on it. But T-Mobile has a chance there, as well. There's a possibility that the FCC will offer up rural airwaves right in T-Mobile's "ultra capacity" zone later this year, in something called Auction 108. If that's the case, it needs to buy, buy, buy, then build, build, build.
Little birdies are telling me that we may hear T-Mobile's big home Internet announcement next week. The one thing I'm praying for there is a real coverage map, or even some sort of stab at one. Too many of these services have proclaimed coverage, and then we've found that almost no addresses in the area qualify. On home internet, this needs to be high on the list of things that T-Mobile will UnCarrier. Do you think T-Mobile can win 5G? Let me know in the comments.
What else is up this week?:
- A global chip shortage means there might not be a Galaxy Note this year. This means the Galaxy S21Ultra becomes a better buy, since it supports the S Pen. The S21 Ultra has also been consistently discounted since its launch; it's $999 at Amazon and Best Buy. Shop accordingly.
- Samsung made another odd move this week, announcing the A52 5G and A72, which look like very good midrange phones, but it didn't announce the A32 or A42, the inexpensive, C-band-compatible 5G phones which just passed the FCC. I'm confused.
- Canada was rocked this week by a $26 billion proposal by number-one carrier Rogers to buy Shaw, owner of number-four carrier Freedom. It's being couched in the usual nonsense language about consolidation being needed for 5G, but Canada already has very good networks in urban centers, and Freedom doesn't even play in rural areas.
- A phone for Trump fans! The Freedom Phone (not to be confused with the perfectly legitimate Canadian wireless carrier) is purported to be a Lineage OS-powered phone that comes preloaded with the social app Parler and a censorship-free app store. But given that it's a crowdfunding project run by a 22-year-old, it feels more like a way to separate Parler and Gab fans from their money.
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