T-Mobile today announced that its 600MHz 5G network has gone live across the United States.
According to T-Mobile, its 5G network covers more than 200 million people and more than 1 million square miles… There are currently no iPhones that are compatible with T-Mobile’s 5G network, with Apple planning to release its first iPhones that support 5G connectivity in 2020.
T-Mobile’s 5G network is a 600MHz network, which gives it greater range than the mmWave 5G networks other carriers like AT&T and Verizon are focusing on, but less speed. T-Mobile’s 5G is faster than 4G, but it won’t reach some of the blazing fast speeds that are possible with mmWave technology. When 5G is mentioned, most people are talking about millimeter wave spectrum, which offers blazing fast data transfer speeds, but it is sensitive to interference from buildings, trees, and other obstacles and it is best suited to use in dense, urban locations.
5G in rural and suburban areas will be on mid and low-bands, which is also known as sub-6GHz 5G, simply because of the restrictions of the mmWave technology.
MacDailyNews Take: While this 5G is certainly better than AT&T’s fake, LTE re-labeled “5GE,” it’s not mmWave 5G.
When Apple releases their next-gen iPhones is when 5G will really arrive.
We’ll hear a lot of noise from the very vocal super-minority about how “Apple’s fallen behind” by not offering a radio that can communicate with a network that isn’t available to pretty much everyone yet, but that’s all it’ll be: meaningless noise that won’t affect regular people’s iPhone purchases. Late 2020 is the beginning of the 5G revolution, not 2019. — MacDailyNews, August 22, 2019
T-Mobile has published an interactive, zoomable 600MHz 5G map at t-mobile.com/5Gmap.