The story of 5G over the past two years hasn’t been one to pay much attention to. Carriers have forced the logo on your phone and likely had a hand in making you pay for the technology that pushes it, all while your experience on their network hasn’t changed much. You either had “5G” that wasn’t any faster than your previous LTE connection, or you were told there was 5G somewhere in your city, on a random block, that could maybe produce 2Gbps speeds if you were standing on a street corner. In other words, 5G has been a bust.
Today, T-Mobile is firing up 5G you should actually care about.
When T-Mobile bought Sprint, they acquired a bunch of 2.5GHz spectrum that will be used as mid-band 5G and will be a portion of a 5G network that will produce meaningful speeds and connections. T-Mobile has had “nationwide” 5G for a while as low-band 5G, but it’s mostly like an LTE connection in terms of speeds and experience. Mid-band 5G is worth paying attention to.
T-Mobile says it has turned on mid-band 5G in over 80 cities and towns as of this morning. With this mid-band (2.5GHz) 5G, you could see speeds 7.5x greater than your current LTE connection. T-Mobile has suggested average download speeds around 300Mbps with peaks hitting 1Gbps.
To get a better feel for the importance of mid-band, T-Mobile’s layer cake graphic does a great job of explaining. Below, you can see the low-band 5G, the reach it has without the speeds (height in the cake). The mid-band might not reach as far, but it can still spread over large distances, while creating faster speeds. Then you have 5G mmW at the top, which is the super fast 5G that can barely work properly through a window and is more like a WiFi hotspot used in dense cities and stadiums. The mid-band is a good balance of reach and speed.
As a part of today’s news, T-Mobile released a list of cities that now have access to their mid-band 5G. Start scrolling to see if your town made the cut.
California
- Citrus
- La Puente
- Los Angeles
- Paramount
- San Fernando
- Willowbrook
District of Columbia
- Washington D.C.
Florida
- Azalea Park
- Holiday
- Progress Village
- Westchase
Georgia
- Atlanta
- Gainesville
- Mableton
- North Atlanta
- Winder
Illinois
- Bellwood
- Calumet City
- Chicago
- Chicago Heights
- Glendale Heights
- Hanover Park
- Ingalls Park
- Northlake
Indiana
- Merrillville
Maryland
- Towson
Massachusetts
- Holbrook
- Waltham
Michigan
- Bangor
- Decatur
Minnesota
- Maplewood
Missouri
- Jennings
New Jersey
- Camden
- Cliffside Park
- Fort Lee
- Hasbrouck Heights
- North Arlington
- Palisades Park
- Paterson
- Roselle
- Totowa
New York
- Copiague
- East Williston
- Freeport
- Garden City
- Garden City Park
- Harbor Isle
- Hempstead
- Island Park
- Lindenhurst
- Long Beach
- Malverne Park Oaks
- Middle Island
- Mineola
- New York
- Plainview
- West Hempstead
- Williston Park
North Carolina
- Clemmons
- Kernersville
- Pineville
- Stallings
- Statesville
- Winston-Salem
Oregon
- Aloha
- Newberg
- Sherwood
Pennsylvania
- Braddock
- Colwyn
- Darby
- East Lansdowne
- Kerrtown
- Meadville
- Philadelphia
- Rankin
- Yeadon
Texas
- Dallas
- Houston
- Nassau Bay
Virginia
- Bailey’s Crossroads
- Bull Run
- Highland Springs
- Lake Barcroft
- Newport News
- Sudley
- Tysons Corner
Washington
- Geneva
- Oak Harbor
- Snohomish
Again, this is big news in the 5G world. If you live in one of these areas and have a supported mid-band 5G phone, you might actually like 5G for the first time.
// T-Mobile
All roads lead to La Puente, (or Paramount)!
Does this help my pixel 3a xl?
Not for now. Not that many 5G phones out there to reduce LTE usage.
Should’ve done Gainesville FL instead of Gainesville GA
I’m starting to get annoyed at T-Mobile’s ignoring of unlocked devices when it comes to first class status on their 5G network. For example, they have the OnePlus 8 5G that they sell on their list, but the OnePlus 8 Pro with same radio hardware (as well as the unlocked OP8 that lacks the T-Mobile update) get left out in the cold.
The OP8Pro supports 2.5ghz 5G as well.
If that’s true, then T-Mobile needs to work on their messaging. Back in march the OnePlus 8 5g T-Mobile edition was given a very specific update for 5G that unlocked devices didn’t get which made it sound like it was necessary for the future 5g expansion.
Beyond that though, any unlocked 5g device I’ve had on T-Mobile behaves…oddly. I’ve had my sim in a OP8P 5g, S20 Ultra, and Note 20 Ultra at my home location and they all report 5g despite not having 5g in the area (and when you dig deeper you find out that they are only actually on LTE.) They also operate at slower speeds when reporting 5g than if you force them back to LTE which implies that whatever is happening is messing with the channel aggregation.
yo! I have a Oneplus 8P and my speeds are terrrrrible. I live in Minneapolis and whenever I’m off Wi-Fi I can barley load a website. It shows as “5G” but there is no way it’s really 5G. Are you saying switching to LTE would be better? I’ve looked online quite a bit and even spoke to a rep at TMO, but she assured me 5G was faster and was running just fine. This is the worst connection I’ve ever had it’s unbearable to use when I’m not on Wi-Fi it’s starting to really piss me off.
Very possibly, yes. You don’t really have much to lose since it’s a simple toggle in the network settings.
You can turn the 5g off until you get better 5g speeds. Just use LTE for now.
There is no reason to have slow loading pages.
Obviously TMO is working on it. It won’t be so slow forever. Until then use the fast LTE.
You get what you paid for. Don’t blame TMO. TMO doesn’t have any responsibilities to push updates to unlocked phones. In your case, OnePlus is the one that should push out the updates to all unlocked phones.
The issue is with Samsung as well. This implies that T-Mobile is only allowing their “secret sauce” to be on carrier branded devices which is something that we shouldn’t be supporting after finally breaking free from dumb carrier optimized devices.
In the auto shop I work at there is a cell tower that wasn’t being used until recently work was started to be done. My boss said they told him it’s a TMO tower. I already have TMO as my ISP. Going to pop the sim into my phone once the tower is up and running. Hopefully it’s 5G!
So Would i need to research of a certain phone supports these bands? For example will the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 support these cause its a 5G phone?
If they haven’t already, T-Mobile will probably produce a list of supported devices pretty soon.
Here’s a list of devices from the June fact sheet https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2020/06/5G-Fact-Sheet-Original-File.pdf
All except for the S10 5G work on the 2.5 GHz band.
5G DEVICES:
• LG V60 ThinQ (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz)
• OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz)
• OnePlus 8 5G (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz)
• Samsung Galaxy Note10+ 5G (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz)
• Samsung Galaxy S10 5G (mmWave)
• Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz, mmWave)
• Samsung Galaxy S20 5G (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz)
• Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G (600 MHz, 2.5 GHz,
mmWave)
And if I were a betting man, the Note 20 probably does as well.