Has The Tmobile Service Problem On The Essential Phone

For people in many major metro areas, T-Mobile's new low-band 5G and its OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren phone will offer fiddling reward over 4G—unless the T-Mobile/Dart merger goes through.

T-Mobile'southward low-band 5G launched last week. I've been testing it with the McLaren telephone—first in Maui, where it performed very well, and then in New York City, where it hasn't performed as well. T-Mobile's low-band 5G is well-nigh likely to do good people in smaller cities and rural areas. In those places people could come across significant speed increases. In 16 of the nation's height metro areas, T-Mobile's 5G will currently bring no do good. It will bring relatively little benefit in 22 other major metros.

This will modify dramatically if the T-Mobile/Sprint merger closes. If that happens, the ii T-Mobile depression-band phones—the McLaren and the Samsung Galaxy Annotation 10+ 5G—will be able to employ all of Sprint's 2.5GHz 5G airwaves besides as Dish's 600MHz airwaves , and that promises faster speeds in many cities within a few months. That said, you should still probably look for the Samsung Galaxy S11 5G in Feb. That will exist the first phone to handle the total "layer cake" of T-Mobile's 5G frequencies, including very fast, but very limited range millimeter-wave.

What Is T-Mobile Low-Band 5G?

5G isn't a speed, a frequency, or an experience. It'southward a radio encoding method. Information technology can work on any frequency in any channel size betwixt 5MHz and 100MHz. 4G tops out at 20MHz channels. You hear a lot about millimeter-moving ridge because that'south where 5G is very different from 4G right now, because it'due south using channels that are impossibly large for 4G, which gets you those amazing speeds.

But 5G can also work a lot similar 4G in 4G bands, and that's what T-Mobile is doing with its "nationwide" 5G. In 5MHz or 10MHz low-band channels, there's finer no advantage for 5G yet—I'll get to why T-Mobile is bothering in a bit. The speeds for now are just like 4G.

T-Mobile'due south low-ring 5G relies on 600MHz spectrum (the old Television receiver channels 38-51). That spectrum travels great distances, simply there isn't very much of information technology available. T-Mobile has either 20, xxx or 40MHz of spectrum almost everywhere in the Usa. Across the country, it's using 10MHz of that for 4G—5MHz for uploads, 5MHz for downloads. It's using the rest for 5G. It can't combine the two approaches; a phone has to use one or the other at any given time.

Band 71 Usage

So in places where T-Mobile simply has 20MHz, like Atlanta, Boston, and New York, y'all're swapping 10MHz of 4G for 10MHz of 5G. They turn out to perform about the same with the aforementioned level of load.

In 30MHz zones, similar Austin, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and Seattle, you swap 10MHz of 4G for 20MHz of 5G. That will make a slight difference, but it may not exist noticeable.

T-Mobile Low Band Bad Markets

The noticeable difference, which I saw in Maui, comes in 40MHz zones. Those would be places like Boise, Chattanooga, Spokane, Tucson, and Wichita. There, you're exchanging 10MHz of 4G for a juicy 30MHz of 5G, and in Maui I saw that boost speeds by upwardly to 100Mbps. These results are from Maui, which has 40MHz of low-band.

T-Mobile Low Band 5G Speeds

Here's a set of primal 40MHz cities, where operation should be good right at present. (Click on the map to become a larger, more readable image.)

I had to leave some cities out here because T-Mobile's spectrum in those cities is inhabited by Television receiver stations that aren't required to clear out until between January and May 2020. When that time comes around, those cities will boost upward to the 40MHz level, merger or no. Some of them may accept cleared already; I'1000 not sure. According to Spectrum Gateway, that list includes Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Buffalo, Colorado Springs, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Raleigh, Rochester, Waco, Wichita, Tallahassee, Tulsa, and Washington DC, as well as about of New Hampshire and Maine.

Some Good T-Mobile 5G Cities

I don't have a full map of all the 40MHz zones, but this map from Spectrum Omega is a decent proxy. The 600MHz ring was cleaved upwardly into seven blocks for auction, and to achieve 40MHz, T-Mobile needed four of them. Look at the "E" cake, which makes the departure in a lot of areas. The majestic regions are T-Mobile, and you can see that they steer articulate of a lot of major cities.

If you lot're in one of the regal places, you lot're likely to run into a boost like to what I got in Maui. If you're in 1 of the not-purple places, T-Mobile's depression-band 5G isn't going to have a lot to offering until the merger goes through.

New York City Blues

Testing T-Mobile's 5G in New York Urban center, I got speeds that were the aforementioned as a Samsung Galaxy S10e on 4G in a all-time case scenario, and significantly lower than the Milky way S10e in several locations. That'south considering of what the Milky way S10e can amass, and what a low-ring 5G phone currently can't.

The speeds and capacity nosotros get from phones nowadays come up from combining different lanes of spectrum, something we telephone call carrier aggregation.

I'1000 going to fling a lot of frequency band numbers at you now. The important one is band 71, T-Mobile'south 600MHz low-band. When information technology's beingness used for 4G, information technology's chosen 71. When it's existence used for 5G, information technology'southward called n71.

On a 4G phone, T-Mobile generally aggregates up to 4 lanes of spectrum. These can exist mid-ring (bands two and 66), low-band (bands 12 and 71), or the Wi-Fi-similar band 46, which is used for actress capacity in dense centre city locations. (There is besides an older band number, 4, which is a subset of 66 and which T-Mobile appears to be renaming as 66 for newer phones .)

The McLaren'due south hardware tin amass 5G and 4G bands together, combining them for improve speed than 4G or 5G alone. It works well together with bands two and 66, T-Mobile's most widespread bands for coverage and capacity. But information technology tin can't aggregate 5G band n71 with T-Mobile's other 4G bands.

(If you want to see every possible 4G carrier aggregation combination, feast your eyes. )

Bands 12 and 71 are a wash. Y'all tin can't combine 12 and 71 on a 4G telephone anyhow (they're too close), so y'all end up exchanging either 12MHz of band 12 or 10MHz of band 71, for 10MHz of 5G n71, which is basically passing a money from one hand to the other. In exam locations where my 4G phone was combining bands 2/66/71 or two/12/66, speeds were pretty much the same on the 5G phone.

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But when I stumbled upon band 46—ouch. Band 46 is rare, but you actually observe it when information technology's gone. Information technology's used mostly in super-congested spaces like sports stadiums, downtowns, and higher campuses. I found it in Matrimony Square in Manhattan, and losing it dropped my speeds from 128Mbps with a 4G phone to 25.1Mbps with a 5G telephone.

T-Mobile 5G NYC download speeds

Note: That's aggregation between bands 2/66/71 or 2/12/66, because you tin can't exercise 12/71 at the same time. But the performance is roughly the same in the two configurations.

Most chiefly, there is no math that gets you to amend speeds with the 5G phone in one of the 20MHz low-band markets. In that location'south no mode to proceeds lanes. You might as well but be using a 4G phone.

Why Do This at All?

Okay, and then why bother doing 5G at all in 600MHz? Other than the marketing reward of maxim y'all've got a lot of 5G, there are a bunch of new capabilities coming online later in 2020 that T-Mobile wants to take advantage of. Network slicing would let it provide a reliable rural home internet business without home users getting their lanes crowded with mobile users. Low-latency communication, and the ability to address big numbers of industrial devices enable concern uses like drone management and agricultural sensors. In other words, information technology'due south near future applications that aren't just getting internet on your telephone. Those things don't demand fast speeds, but they demand aspects of the 5G spec that haven't been fully turned on however.

The Sprint/T-Mobile merger would add 60MHz of mid-band spectrum to the McLaren'south attainable 5G portfolio, boosting speeds considerably and providing a existent departure. Sprint's 5G is most built out in some of the cities where T-Mobile's low-ring is weakest, similar Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and New York.

Dish too has unused 600MHz licenses right next to the ones T-Mobile is using, often in T-Mobile'south most constricted cities. Role of the merger agreement would involve T-Mobile getting access to that low-band spectrum, which would heighten it to 40MHz of depression-band or more in Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Seattle, and other places where T-Mobile is now weak. Ookla has a map of that combination in this story. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com'south parent company.)

The networks are all very complementary, and if they merge, that'south a compelling reason to get something like the McLaren.

xiv country attorneys general are currently fighting the merger in court, in a case expected to final most three weeks. And then we could get a resolution to this saga by the new year's day. If T-Mobile doesn't merge with Sprint, it volition have to rely more on its millimeter-wave holdings for in-city 5G, which ways that the McLaren (which doesn't support mmWave) would be a poor choice, and you'll demand to agree out for the Samsung Galaxy S11, which volition presumably support mmWave.

I'm still working on a total review of the OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren. At the moment, information technology'due south $899 where the OnePlus 7 Pro is $549—that'due south a $350 bump. The differences are pretty much only a slightly faster processor, a slightly faster-charging bombardment, more than storage, and 5G. With the way I now empathise things, I can't justify that price unless the phone gets access to the Sprint and Dish spectrum equally well, so go on an eye on the court instance.

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