The news came via the company’s chief technology officer Neville Ray, who made the announcement at the Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference in Barcelona.
According to Reuters, at the conference Ray was quoted as saying: “We’re committed to drive a 5G rollout by 2020 across the nation.”
Further to this Fierce Wireless quotes him as adding: “and neither AT&T nor Verizon have stepped up to that challenge. There’s been a lot of discussion [of] millimetre wave and the kind of surgical, tactical deployments of 5G, and we’ll be there too. But we’ll deploy in the 600 MHz for 5G as we move into the next decade.”
While AT&T and Verizon seem focussed on fixed wireless technologies for 5G, T-Mobile seems to have shifted its focus to 600 MHz airwaves as its strategy for the next-generation network.
“We have to have a strong mid-band 5G story for the U.S. marketplace,” continued Ray. “I think the discussion has moved away from the early, Verizon-led millimetre-wave story … Millimetre wave will play a role but we’re pushing hard on the other end, low-band.”
Earlier this month, T-Mobile demonstrated real world LTE speeds topping 673Mbps in partnership with Qualcomm aimed at showcasing the power and speed of Gigabit LTE. Three technologies were used during the demonstration, which are: carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), and 256QAM.
In related news T-Mobile US was once again linked to Sprint over resumed talks of a merger between the two. Discussions of the acquisition are rumoured to have been called off earlier this month over failure to agree on the structure of a company.
