BARCELONA—T-Mobile’s tech president used his slice of a panel here at MWC to take a victory lap and preview the next race in 5G: deploying the bundle of network upgrades that goes by the vague name of “5G Advanced.”
“We’ve gone from number four in our nation to become the leader with our network,” Ulf Ewaldsson said in a panel Monday, touting T-Mobile’s coverage and speed and crediting the carrier’s 2020 purchase of Sprint for enabling that leap. (Nationwide results from Ookla’s Speedtest network-benchmarking tool suggest that Ewaldsson’s boasting is not out of band.)
Next up, he said, is rolling out the capacity and speed improvements made possible by a combination of technologies: the “standalone 5G” architecture T-Mobile began rolling out in 2020, high-performance network slicing built on that framework to provide specialized services, and carrier aggregation to fuse frequencies for faster connections.
“T-Mobile is about to make 5G Advanced nationwide,” he said, pledging an upside of better coverage and capacity from the same physical network.
The carrier is also moving to infuse AI into its cloud-based network management platform, both to automate that work and to open up new business possibilities for itself in connectivity for businesses and services. Ewaldsson’s conclusion: “This puts us in a position where we can move from telco to tech co.”
In a conversation with PCMag afterwards, he expanded on these points—starting with a definition of 5G Advanced that he centered around standalone 5G, in which a cell tower doesn’t need to open a connection with a device over 4G LTE.
T-Mobile at first turned on standalone 5G only for its low-band frequencies, but at the time the carrier estimated that this 1.0 deployment improved its 5G coverage by 30%. “Now we’re bringing it to the entire network, and we’re able to automate the programming of it,” he said of “SA” 5G. “We can just send a command, and get it done.”
Predictions about how AI will advance everything can invite eyerolling among industry experts who have seen too many of those pitches. The quick take from analyst Avi Greengart, president of Techsponential, right after Ewaldsson’s speech invoking AI: “It might make the network more efficient. It certainly makes it more buzzwordy.”
But Ewaldsson said using AI to tend T-Mobile’s RAN (Radio Access Network) is already yielding reliability improvements. “The network is holding up better than it’s ever done,” he said. “We have halved the downtime per subscriber by using AI technology.”
And AI network management also helps its fixed-wireless home broadband service, which the carrier reported in January had grown to 6.4 million subscribers by the end of last year.
“Every one of the towers we have has a certain leftover capacity that we use for fixed wireless,” Ewaldsson explained. “We are able to allocate that with algorithms that are very precise.”
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He also observed how nationwide standalone 5G enables network slices such as the new T-Priority offering for first responders and others for such segments as retail and hospitals.
“This type of technology gives consumers and enterprises a possibility to make sure their services work independent of what else is going on,” Ewaldsson said.
And T-Mobile can expand the carrier aggregation that it began deploying on its standalone 5G in 2021 to “massive amounts of carrier ag”; it now aggregates four channels for downloads, to be upgraded to five, and two for uploads.
Greengart’s overall read on T-Mobile’s MWC message: T-Mobile’s network is already good, but now watch what it can do for customers with network slices. “They reiterated that they have a very very rich and deep and fast network,” he said. “Your average US consumer isn’t going to need network slicing, but your average firefighter very well might.”
(Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)
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About Rob Pegoraro
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