In Early August, T-Mobile claimed a world’s first with the launch of a nationwide standalone 5G network that uses its 600 MHz spectrum. T-Mo initially launched its 600 MHz 5G network last year and reached nationwide coverage–200 million people covered–using the non-standalone architecture. With the shift to standalone, the operator saw a coverage expansion of 30% to 1.3 million square miles, upping population coverage to 250 million, and a 40% reduction in latency.
Before we look ahead, let’s look back at some milestones in T-Mobile’s journey to standalone. In August 2019, T-Mobile completed a standalone 5G over the air data session using multi-vendor kit in a Bellevue, Washington lab. Vendor support came from Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco and MediaTek.
