On February 25, T-Mobile announced that its 600 MHz 5G service won’t start until the second half of the year, due to a lack of compatible devices, reported VentureBeat.
Last year, T-Mobile said that it would launch its 5G network in the first half of 2019, with a 30-city plan offering, focusing on lower-speed but longer-distance 600 MHz radios that could blanket “hundreds of square miles” with 5G service. Conversely, competitors AT&T and Verizon are deploying high-speed, short-distance millimeter wave 5G transmitters.
T-Mobile said it rolled out 600 MHz towers across 2,700 towns and cities within 42 states, but the carrier apparently couldn’t find a handset manufacturer to build a phone with 5G support for that frequency, reported VentureBeat. Handset makers have focused most of their energy on making 5G phones with 28 GHz to 39 GHz millimeter wave transmitters, and/or “sub-6 GHz” transmitters in the 2.5 GHz to 3.7 GHz range. Most of the world’s cellular carriers and regulatory agencies have coalesced on those frequencies for 5G service. T-Mobile was an outlier in banking heavily upon low-frequency 600 MHz spectrum for 5G.
T-Mobile’s intended merger partner Sprint, who will begin rolling out 5G in May 2019, announced three 5G devices for its network, while T-Mobile confirmed that it will only sell the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, which includes millimeter wave 5G hardware.
T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray suggests T-Mobile will sell 5G phones in the first half of 2019, so there’s “no delay,” but that the “meaningful” [600 MHz] devices won’t arrive until the second half of the year. Comments? Email Us.
March 5, 2019
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