T-Mobile's Pre-Launch 5G Network Results Are Encouraging

T-Mobile is dense in the best way. Its upcoming 5G network in New York will take advantage of its unusually dense, existing network in Midtown to boost speeds over continuous stretches in a way Verizon hasn't been able to do yet in Chicago. That doesn't mean you should sign up now, though.

T-Mobile's 5G network hasn't launched yet, but in true UnCarrier style, if you can ninja your way onto it, they'll let you. Last week, Ookla Technical Evangelist Milan Milanovic tested it in Midtown Manhattan with a Verizon-model Galaxy S10 5G, so I had to try a similar trick.

I need to note that T-Mobile has not launched this network, it hasn't been optimized, it was being used with a phone not designed for T-Mobile, and the carrier didn't want me to do this. Results will be better when T-Mobile actually launches the network.

That said, wow. I found 5G between 42nd and 46th Streets along 3rd Avenue in midtown Manhattan, getting impressive speeds considering that T-Mobile currently only has 100MHz of 5G deployed. That means theoretical speeds would go up to 625Mbps, but no higher. Testing from 111 to 336 feet from a cell site, I got pretty consistent speeds from 350-490Mbps, with 475Mbps at the nearest point and 493Mbps at the farthest.

That was a definite step up from LTE. Not that LTE was bad; I got between 62Mbps and 113Mbps on a network that was much more heavily loaded than the 5G network. (Every New Yorker with T-Mobile was on LTE; I was probably the only person on 5G.) But the millimeter-wave will add significant capacity in a place which often needs it.

Cell radius appeared to be about 400 feet, but T-Mobile doesn't necessarily need more than that in Midtown. "Short blocks" in Manhattan are about 200 feet, and it looks like the carrier has cell sites every four blocks already in a lot of Midtown. So unlike Verizon in Chicago, it doesn't need to install a lot of new sites; it just needs to add panels to existing ones.

That said, Verizon also has a lot of panels up in Manhattan, and much more millimeter-wave spectrum than T-Mobile does. I would love to see what Verizon's millimeter-wave build will look like in Midtown, and according to a Verizon exec, I'm not going to have long to wait.

(Credit: Cellmapper.net)

T-Mobile is clearly using the same beamforming tricks I saw Verizon using in Chicago. Millimeter wave beamforming means you don't see speeds gently drop off the way you do with 4G LTE; you get very fast speeds to the cell edge, and then they just drop.

I'm also pretty sure T-Mobile's network management team got wise to my trickery, because after a bunch of tests, things started to look speed-capped. (I kept getting exactly the same result, several times.) That's when I stopped.

The forest of panels on the building to the left is all T-Mobile. The small, squarish one on the right-hand edge of the bunch is the 5G panel.

More Bands Are Better

Outside midtown Manhattan, millimeter wave may have a harder row to hoe. Take my own neighborhood of Jackson Heights, an extremely dense neighborhood of six-story apartment buildings, not a suburb.

The major business corridors for local residents are Roosevelt Avenue, 37th Avenue, and Northern Boulevard. 37th Avenue is served by a site between 72nd and 73rd Street, and maybe by that site down 75th Street. But the whole stretch from 77th to 82nd Streets—including the public school, the post office, the wine store, the stationery store, and my favorite Japanese restaurant—would probably be out of T-Mobile's millimeter-wave range.

(Credit: Cellmapper.net)

But that's where low-band 5G will come in. Low-band gives T-Mobile 5G coverage that millimeter-wave can't match, at the cost of lower speeds. That would blanket our neighborhood, and probably yours. T-Mobile argues that adding Sprint's mid-band spectrum would be an unbeatable combination. It's right, from a technical perspective. Opposition to the companies' merger comes from the idea that a stronger joined company, after a few years and possibly under new management, would raise prices and cut retail locations.

The first set of 5G phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, won't support low-band, and won't be able to support both millimeter-wave and mid-band. So T-Mobile subscribers will probably want to wait until later this year, when multi-band 5G phones come out, to jump on board.

What Is 5G?