5G

T-Mobile hams up 5G coverage at Verizon’s expense

HAWAII—It’s become somewhat of a ritual for T-Mobile. Bring the cakes, fake or real, and show off how much 5G coverage or mid-band spectrum that T-Mobile holds in comparison to rivals AT&T and Verizon.

At one of the first big in-person tech media events since the Covid pandemic – the Qualcomm-hosted Snapdragon Tech Summit – T-Mobile made sure to bring the physical goods: cake models comparing the 5G coverage of the three biggest U.S. wireless carriers; a T-Mobile edition of the traditional Lite-Brite game with a lone light displaying Verizon’s coverage in Hawaii; and two-sided posters comparing T-Mobile’s vast 5G coverage and Verizon’s “dot” of 5G coverage on the Big Island.

T-Mobile’s pink or magenta “cake” is about twice the size of Verizon’s red cake and well, AT&T is basically just an oversized blue cupcake.

T-Mobile cakes
T-Mobile played up the cake theme on the sidelines of the Snapdragon summit.  (Fierce Wireless)

“It’s really the mid-band that provides the capabilities that many of these use cases require,” hence the cakes, all three of them representing the major U.S. wireless networks in terms of how far and how deeply their 5G is deployed, according to Karri Kuoppamaki, SVP, Technology Development & Strategy at T-Mobile, on the sidelines of the summit.

Figuratively, the 5G layer cake is the cornerstone of T-Mobile’s 5G spectrum strategy, with the three tiers representing low, mid and high band spectrum. All the U.S. carriers are making use of the three spectrum layers, but T-Mobile seized on the cake idea early on, and it boasts the largest position in the mid-band arena. Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon are getting a large part of their mid-band fix through the C-band, which is currently held up with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) concerns, increasing T-Mobile’s head start on 2.5 GHz holdings acquired from Sprint.

Last month, T-Mobile announced it now covers 200 million people with its 2.5 GHz spectrum, a time table that was six weeks ahead of schedule.

“I think this is a good way to kind of visualize and understand the power of the network that we have,” in terms of the size differences, Kuoppamaki said, referring to the cakes displayed in T-Mobile’s conference room here at the Fairmont Orchid hotel. The T-Mobile cake provides “enough for everybody,” he said.

It’s not just the spectrum that’s making it all happen, he added. That’s one thing, but “maybe more important is the people. I am so proud of our engineers, both in the field as well as in the headquarters, making all this happen. That is a unique advantage that we have… it’s all about execution and making it happen.”

RELATED: T-Mobile aims for 300M by 2023 with 2.5 GHz

Its next big goal is to cover 300 million people with 2.5 GHz by the end of 2023.

But T-Mobile says it’s not stopping with the widest 5G mid-band coverage, either. “We’re not just focused on deploying the network,” said Ryan Sullivan, VP of Device & Technology at T-Mobile. “We’re also looking at making sure that we are on the leading edge of deploying new features over 5G so that we can move faster than everybody else,” with an eye toward an all-5G world.

“We’re extensively testing multiple combinations where we’re taking 5G carriers and we’re aggregating them together,” both in stand alone (SA) and non-stand alone (NSA) modes, Sullivan said. It’s also conducting tests of Voice over NR, or 5G voice services, but that isn’t yet ready for a full-on commercial rollout.

More competition for the enterprise  

Now that it’s built a 5G network, T-Mobile plans to go after the enterprise space in a big way. Prior to 5G, it didn’t make a big dent in the enterprise market, attracting about 10% of the market and basically getting clobbered by the likes of AT&T and Verizon, which dominate the other 90%.

With this week’s announcement by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the jury’s still out, but that competition for the enterprise segment increasingly could include AWS as well as Dish Network, which is also entering the wireless space with a 5G network of its own.

Kuoppamaki didn’t comment on specific competitors (other than to say Dish still needs to launch its network, so there’s that) but acknowledged the enterprise is an important part of the future. “We see a lot of potential and opportunity in that space,” he said.

But there again, it goes back to the basics: “Who has the best 5G network in the nation – the biggest and the fastest and the most reliable, and that’s us,” he said. For businesses and enterprise in general, “that’s what they need. Mobility provides a lot of additional value, so I think we have an advantage that is in place already today with the network that we’ve built that allows us to go after that segment in a very meaningful way.”

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As 5G use cases emerge, the demand is coming on the enterprise side in a lot of situations before the consumer side, Sullivan said. Augmented reality/XR, for example, has an allure for consumers in the long term, but right now, the demand is coming from the enterprise that uses them for training opportunities or virtual conferencing.  

Network slicing, one of the advantages often cited from 5G that would most likely target enterprises, becomes more valuable with the kind of stand alone (SA) 5G architecture that T-Mobile has built. While it’s not necessarily in the early stages of development, it is, as a capability, “emerging,” Kuoppamaki said. “Not all the building blocks are in place today,” he said. “I think it’s one of those things where it just takes a little bit of time for things to mature” to the point where it actually delivers the kind of value that it’s meant to bring.

Right now, T-Mobile doesn’t have much to brag about when it comes to the size of the enterprise market it serves, but if it plays its cards right and this theme continues, one day it could take a bigger slice of the enterprise cake.