T-Mobile is in a position to decommission tens of thousands of Sprint cell sites in 2022, Neville Ray, President of Technology for T-Mobile, told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference 2022 this week in San Francisco. Ray said the integration of Sprint and T-Mobile is progressing ahead of schedule, which is helping the carrier deploy its 5G network. That said, it opens the door to a great deal more cell tower decommissioning.
“As we combine these networks and we migrate traffic, we’re in a position to start decommissioning cell sites as we start cutting down the legacy network,” Ray said. “And why is that important? Because it just drives massive synergies for this company.”
T-Mobile decommissioned thousands of sites last year. But in 2022, that activity will ramp up and hit a peak in mid-year before closing out by year-end. The carrier must still upgrade the towers and backhaul in the sites that it is keeping from the Sprint portfolio, which Ray said is progressing well.
“Over the two years [since buying Sprint], we’ve spent a lot of time really understanding the information and data about Sprint customer usage on the network, and so now we’re able to, on a site-by-site basis, measure and quantify the impact on the customers of the decommissioning, the T-Mobile coverage, T-Mobile upgrade and T-Mobile 5G, when it gets there.”
Even with the macro tower decommissioning, T-Mobile will still have the largest collection of cell sites in the industry, Ray said. “This plan is macro based. I mean, those are the physics. We are not building 5G on the backs of small cell and millimeter-wave sites,” Ray said. “So this is a macro build with large volumes of macro sites with very, very deep mid-band spectrum holdings, and all of the benefits of spectral efficiency in 5G that then generate huge capacity for us to go and drive all these growth factors.”
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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