T-Mobile's 'nationwide' 5G network continues its steady march to ubiquity

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T-Mobile's 'nationwide' 5G network continues its steady march to ubiquity
The first "Un-carrier Move" of the "New T-Mobile" era was all about making good on a promise from before Magenta's combination with Sprint was completed last month. But T-Mo actually had more to announce yesterday than the official launch of its Connecting Heroes program making all wireless service, nationwide 5G access included, absolutely free for state and local first responders.

Even though America's third-largest cellular company billed its 5G network as available "nationwide" right off the bat, said availability was further expanded several times in the last few months. Yet another expansion is happening as we speak, and while T-Mobile is not spreading the love across many new places, some pretty big cities are being added to the already impressive coverage map

We're talking about San Francisco and Sacramento, where T-Mobile's somewhat controversial 5G service is live right now, as well as Tampa and Orlando, where the next-gen connectivity is "starting to light up." Even excluding the latter two cities, the 5G network already covers "nearly 6,000 cities and towns and more than 225 million Americans across more than 1 million square miles."


Just because the flamboyant and outspoken John Legere is no longer the wireless giant's CEO, that doesn't mean the rival-mocking "Un-carrier" spirit is dead, with both the company's newest press release and President of Technology Neville Ray's latest tweet taking a jab at Verizon. Believe it or not, Big Red's 5G network barely covers around 36 square miles across "limited outdoor areas" of 34 cities, which means T-Mobile offers roughly 28,000 times (!!!) more 5G coverage than the nation's leading wireless service provider.

Of course, not all 5G networks are created equal, which brings us to the aforementioned controversial part of T-Mobile's "high-speed" service. As emphasized in countless tests and in-depth reports conducted over the last few months, this is only marginally faster than Magenta's 4G LTE network, which by the way covers "more than 99 percent of people" in the US.

Then again, that's just a temporary situation, as T-Mo plans to add Sprint's mid-band spectrum on top of its existing low-band technology and then complete its so-called "layer cake" with blazing fast mmWave 5G. The end goal is to strike the perfect balance between speed and availability across New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sacramento, Tampa, Orlando, and many more places where Verizon and AT&T are unlikely to deliver comparable services anytime soon.

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