Shrinking Parts of T-Mobile Network Still on LTE
Pockets of the U.S. served by T-Mobile remain LTE only, but “the vast majority” of the network is now 5G, said Neville Ray, T-Mobile president-technology, during a New Street and Boston Consulting conference Monday. Ray said in some areas T-Mobile…
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is leaning on a roaming agreement with AT&T, which has opened up some rural markets through its FirstNet build. T-Mobile’s 5G build hit a peak this year and the company will shift “to what we call customer-driven coverage … making sure that we are investing where it really matters, where there is differentiated need for new coverage or additional coverage from T-Mobile,” Ray said. That includes more in-building coverage and some locations T-Mobile hasn’t yet reached, he said. Ray also noted T-Mobile’s work with SpaceX on satellite connections (see 2209150072). The service will be “text- and messaging-based in the early running” but will evolve to provide more “ubiquitous connectivity,” he said. T-Mobile should be positioned to support as many as 8 million fixed wireless customers in 2025, Ray said. “There is a lot of latent demand for the product that we are bringing to the marketplace,” he said: “From a capacity perspective, we have always been very careful and diligent to make sure that we grow this network for fixed wireless in the right places.” T-Mobile announced Monday that it's now lighting up its stand-alone (SA) core network with its 2.5 GHz spectrum. The SA network has been using 600 MHz spectrum since 2020, Ray said. “The move immediately advances T-Mobile’s network -- unleashing faster speeds for customers across the country while further reducing any lag in the network with lower latency, improving applications like gaming that require near real-time responsiveness,” T-Mobile said.