T-Mobile CTO says 5G's high-frequency spectrum won't cover rural America.
5G mobile networks have started arriving but only in very limited areas and amidst misleading claims by wireless carriers. While all four major nationwide carriers in the United States have overhyped 5G to varying degrees, T-Mobile today made a notable admission about 5G's key limitation. T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray
wrote in a blog post that millimeter-wave spectrum used for 5G "will never materially scale beyond small pockets of 5G hotspots in dense urban environments." That would seem to rule out the possibility of 5G's fastest speeds reaching rural areas or perhaps even suburbs. Ray made his point with this GIF, apparently showing that millimeter-wave frequencies are immediately blocked by a door closing halfway while the lower 600MHz signal is unaffected:
With 4G, carriers prioritized so-called "beachfront spectrum" below 1GHz in order to cover the entire US, both rural areas and cities. 5G networks will use both low and high frequencies, but they're supposed to offer their highest speeds on millimeter waves. Millimeter-wave spectrum is usually defined to include frequencies between 30GHz and 300GHz. But in the context of 5G, carriers and regulators have generally targeted frequencies between 24GHz and 90GHz. T-Mobile's high-frequency spectrum includes licenses in the 28GHz and 39GHz bands. Millimeter waves generally haven't been used in cellular networks because they don't travel far and are easily blocked by walls and other obstacles. This has led us to wonder how extensive higher-speed 5G deployments will be outside major cities, and now T-Mobile's top technology official is saying explicitly that millimeter-wave 5G deployments will just be for "small pockets" of highly populated areas. Ray wrote his blog post primarily to complain about AT&T and Verizon claiming to be the first carriers to offer 5G, so his statement about high-frequency limitations was made partly to explain why T-Mobile hasn't yet launched 5G. (There's also the small matter of there not being any 5G phones in the market aside from a Motorola phone sold by Verizon that requires a hardware attachment to access 5G.) "Verizon's mmWave-only 5G plan is only for the few. And it will never reach rural America," Ray wrote. Ray pointed out that early reviewers of Verizon's small 5G launch had trouble finding a signal.
