Undeterred by the coronavirus pandemic that made its network upgrading and expansion work much more difficult than in a “normal” year, T-Mobile had an absolutely blockbuster 2020. The “Un-carrier” managed to surpass AT&T’s subscriber numbers just a few months after completing its long-in-the-works Sprint acquisition, spending the rest of the year trying (and mostly succeeding) to close the gap to Verizon with the help of killer deals, affordable plans, and perhaps most importantly, huge 5G improvements.
Rural areas got the biggest upgrade
In case you were wondering, there’s a good reason why T-Mobile chose to celebrate its groundbreaking standalone 5G deployment with a magenta-colored drone show in Lisbon, North Dakota rather than, say, Los Angeles or New York City. Unlike mid-band upgrades or mmWave 5G rollouts, this particular development was aimed specifically at rural areas and small towns like Lisbon, which received a massive (and sudden) 5G availability boost.
Interestingly, the rural numbers continued to grow at a steady pace over the following four months, unlike Magenta’s urban 5G availability, which merely gained an additional 1.5 percent. Overall, T-Mobile’s standalone 5G launch did pretty much what the “Un-carrier” promised it would do, significantly widening its network net across the nation.
Apart from rapidly improving coverage, reduced latency was promoted as another key benefit of the standalone 5G technology, and according to the newest OpenSignal tests, T-Mobile delivered in that department as well. 5G latency (or network responsiveness) was substantially upgraded in both urban and rural areas, vastly improving things like multiplayer mobile gaming, real-time communications, and overall web browsing experiences.
5G SA download speeds don’t look so hot… for now
That’s because NSA 5G speeds remain vastly superior to their SA counterparts for the most part due largely to current limitations in many 5G-enabled smartphones. These essentially forced T-Mobile to keep its initial standalone 5G rollout exclusive to slower low-band spectrum.
But most 2021 handsets capable of tapping into 5G networks are expected to support low and mid-band carrier aggregation, which should allow Magenta to close the speed gap between its SA and NSA signals. As things stand, it might seem more beneficial for users who value download speeds above all to connect to non-standalone 5G than standalone 5G. Of course, the very purpose of the 5G SA launch was to cover more ground than it was possible using NSA technology.
