T-Mobile has deployed 2.5 GHz (mid-band) 5G to 198 more markets in 27 states. The company, which has been deploying mid-band aggressively this fall, says that it plans to bring the service to a footprint of almost 100 million people by years end.
Though many of the announcements were for smaller markets, some large cities — such as St. Louis and Cincinnati — are on the list. The press release does not say what percentage of these markets initially will have access.
The deployments are made possible using spectrum controlled by Sprint before the two carriers merged. They are in Arizona (1 market), Arkansas (1 market) California (10 markets), Connecticut (1 market), Florida (12 markets), Georgia (6 markets), Illinois (26 markets), Indiana (5 markets), Kansas (3 markets), Maryland (6 markets), Michigan (5 markets), Minnesota (3 markets), Missouri (11 markets), Nevada (1 market), New Jersey (23 markets), New York (5 markets), North Carolina (8 markets), Ohio (11 markets), Oklahoma (3 markets), Pennsylvania (22 markets), Rhode Island (1 market), South Carolina (2 markets), Tennessee (5 markets), Texas (8 markets), Virginia (12 markets), Washington (2 markets) and Wisconsin (5 markets).
T-Mobile says that has deployed mid-band 5G to more than 400 cities and that it has averaged download speeds of approximately 300 Mbps, with peak speeds as fast as 1 Gbps. Last month, the carrier announced mid-band 5G deployments to 121 markets. A few weeks earlier, it announced deployments to 89 cities and towns.
Mid-band is considered to be the “Goldilocks” spectrum for 5G. The idea is that low-band is comparatively slow and doesn’t provide the stellar performance that separates 5G from LTE, while high-spectrum mmWave is super-fast — but limited in range and by propagation challenges.
Mid-band may pack a more potent punch than the Goldilocks label suggests. In concert with Ericsson, T-Mobile said last month that it had reached speeds of 5.6 Gbps on one channel of 2.5 GHz spectrum and said it would begin deploying equipment capable of this performance in 2021.
A full list of the T-Mobile mid-band 5G markets can be found at this link.
I had to look up one of the “markets” added in Oklahoma with this mid-band expansion because, despite being a life-long Oklahoma resident, I had never heard of the place. It turns out that Smith Village is actually a development within Midwest City, OK, and consists of a 4-square-block area. 4 blocks! This is hardly significant in any way, shape, or form. It’s probably just one old Sprint site that has been upgraded with mid-band. T-Mobile is going to have to do a LOT better than this to make mid-band relevant in any way.