T-Mobile customers are more likely to get a 5G signal than Verizon or AT&T customers
While low-band 5G is only marginally faster than 4G LTE, T-Mobile has the 2.5GHz mid-band airwaves that it acquired from Sprint. With that band employed, T-Mobile can deliver 5G as fast as 300Mbps or 7.5 times faster than its 4G LTE signals. As the nation’s second-largest wireless provider notes, “The Un-carrier’s 5G network is the largest by far, covering 260 million people in more than 7,500 cities and towns. And thanks to the merger with Sprint, T-Mobile is rolling out the best spectrum for 5G — mid-band 2.5 GHz 5G — across the country. It’s already live today in 210 cities and towns and will be in thousands of cities and towns by the end of the year. Where mid-band is deployed, it can deliver average download speeds around 300 Mbps — that’s 7.5x faster than our LTE today — with peak speeds up to 1 Gbps. Verizon’s “Ultra Wideband” can only deliver fast speeds outdoors on specific street corners near base stations. T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G is the sweet spot, it can give customers fast speeds across broad geographies.”
While T-Mobile is deploying its layer cake strategy (low, mid, and high band “layers”) using stand-alone 5G, DSS could lead to a drop in capacity and speed. As Ray says, “The physics are simple. When you force more devices to share crowded airwaves, speeds decrease. I predict Verizon’s speeds on 5G and LTE are about to hit a massive speed bump.”