One of the texts that Neville Ray received from Ulf Ewaldsson this past Sunday was about the number of sites T-Mobile upgraded the prior week. Ewaldsson, T-Mobile’s chief network officer who previously worked at Ericsson, texts him every Sunday night, and this week, his update was about adding new 5G radios to more than 900 sites in a week.
“That was the Sunday-through-Sunday update,” Ray said during an appearance at the Oppenheimer 5G Summit on Tuesday. “900 sites had received a radio upgrade in mid and/or low band. So the pace at which we’ve been driving these upgrades and this rollout of 5G is phenomenal.”
“We’re well on our way to more than 50 percent,” and that’s a moving target due to the size of the network and the fact they’re in the process of decommissioning sites, he said.
However, “we have tens upon tens of thousands of low-band and 2.5 [GHz] sites,” he added. That translates into millions of T-Mobile customers getting an upgrade in a week's time.
The theme behind his comments was not that different than it was almost exactly one year ago when Ray appeared at the same Oppenheimer conference. But this year, T-Mobile is able to gloat about how it now reaches 200 million people with its Ultra Capacity 5G – a goal it met six weeks ahead of schedule. Its Ultra Capacity 5G refers to service supported with its highly prized 2.5 GHz spectrum.
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Its next big goal is to cover 300 million people with 2.5 GHz by the end of 2023, which, Ray pointed out, is about five times as much geography to cover versus 200 million people.
VoNR in the works
One big 5G milestone that remains in the works is Voice over New Radio (VoNR), aka voice services enabled with 5G, which Ray now says will come in 2022 when they’re comfortable with how the service performs.
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VoLTE was difficult because it was the first time the industry had really advanced voice services on a mobility IP layer. It was “clunky,” the features didn’t work very well and it took some time to get the quality up to par in the voice service, he said.
“We’re facing a little bit of that with 5G, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons from what happened with VoLTE,” he said. “But for us, the way I think and my team thinks about where we’re going … We’re a 5G business. We don’t want to be, forever, a 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G business. We want to be a 5G business. That’s why we built out a 5G core,” and “we’re driving very, very hard.”
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It’s the only company in the U.S. thus far to have built out and enabled a 5G core. Until you have a 5G stand-alone (SA) system, you can’t realize all the 5G use cases involving ultra reliable, low latency features. “You need a stand-alone” 5G core and 5G radio network together, he said.