T-Mobile is wasting no time using the low-band spectrum; it paid nearly $8 billion to obtain 1,525 licenses in the FCC’s incentive auction. The carrier won 45 percent of all low-band spectrum sold, some 31 MHz nationwide on average. Two months after T-Mobile received its FCC licenses, the carrier is lighting up its first 600 MHz LTE network sites—fortifying its LTE network and laying the groundwork for 5G at the same time.
The carrier said it switched on its Cheyenne, Wyoming site using Nokia equipment. Starting in rural America and other markets where the spectrum is clear of broadcasters today, T-Mobile plans to quickly deploy the new spectrum — compressing what would normally be a two-year process from auction to consumer availability, into six months. To achieve the aggressive schedule, T-Mobile has been coordinating with infrastructure providers, chipset makers and device manufacturers. This year, additional 600 MHz sites are scheduled, including Wyoming, Northwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia and Eastern Washington.
T-Mobile is also working with the FCC and broadcasters to quickly clear the spectrum; The carrier is paying for the repack costs so PBS affiliates can quickly move their low-power translators, Inside Towers reported.
“We knew this spectrum would be key for covering wide areas, providing bandwidth in hard-to-reach places, augmenting capacity and improving data speeds, so we began testing and readying 600 MHz network infrastructure equipment and software long before the incentive auction was over,” said Nokia President/CEO Rajeev Suri. Nokia and Qualcomm have released new technology to use the 600 MHz spectrum, and both Samsung and LG plan to launch phones that tap into this new spectrum in the fourth quarter of this year, according to T-Mobile.
August 17, 2017
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