T-Mobile's networking chief, Ulf Ewaldsson, said the operator will soon offer 5G-Advanced nationwide. He also explained exactly how T-Mobile defines that technology.
T-Mobile's networking chief, Ulf Ewaldsson, said the company will soon launch 5G-Advanced nationwide. But he also acknowledged the company made its own decision about exactly what 5G-Advanced actually is.
"We promised in September [at T-Mobile's analyst event] that we will deploy 5G-Advanced in our network, and we have done so," Ewaldsson said during a presentation at the MWC Barcelona trade show this week.
During a subsequent conversation with Light Reading, Ewaldsson explained how T-Mobile defines 5G-Advanced:
A standalone 5G core network. T-Mobile launched that in 2020.
Multiple aggregated carriers on the uplink and the downlink. Carrier aggregation technology has been around since 4G. It essentially glues together transmissions in different spectrum bands in order to increase end-user speeds. Ewaldsson said T-Mobile currently aggregates four bands on the downlink and two on the uplink, and it expects to increase that to five on the downlink in the future.
RedCap. 5G (Reduced Capability) technology enables simpler, lower-cost 5G devices with reduced bandwidth and power consumption, and is suitable for IoT and wearable applications. T-Mobile launched that technology last year.
L4S. This technology is also available on wired networks and is intended to reduce network latency and packet loss while maintaining high throughput, thereby improving real-time application performance.
Broadly, Ewaldsson said T-Mobile views itself as a standards setter, having grown into one of the world's leading mobile network operators.
"Champions, they don't try to change the rules written by others. They make their own rules," he said.
The reasoning
In comments to Light Reading, Ewaldsson acknowledged that the official definition of 5G-Advanced is somewhat vague. That's because all of the 5G industry's networking technologies come from the international 3GPP standards organization. That ensures that services on T-Mobile's network can interact with phones from Apple and Samsung and networking equipment from Nokia and Ericsson.
The 3GPP, for its part, provides batches of new networking technologies in annual "releases." In 2021, the 3GPP confirmed that "5G-Advanced" would be the official name for its Release 18 batch of technologies. In June 2024, the 3GPP launched its Release 18 specifications to 5G equipment vendors. As with all 3GPP specifications, network operators and their vendor partners are free to pick and choose what technologies they wish to deploy from those releases, and when they do so.
A portion of T-Mobile's definition for 5G-Advanced stems directly from Release 18 technologies (like RedCap) but it also includes other technologies from prior 3GPP releases (like standalone 5G and carrier aggregation).
"It's part of different 3GPP releases," Ewaldsson explained. "So it doesn't really matter. It's always been like this. If you are the first one to launch something, and you say it's part of 5G-Advanced, then it is," he said.
Ewaldsson added that China Mobile launched 5G-Advanced a few months ago (by T-Mobile's definition) and "we don't want the US to be behind."
This is normal
Ewaldsson's predecessor at T-Mobile, Neville Ray, first debuted the concept of a 5G "layer cake" at the MWC Barcelona trade show in 2018. T-Mobile has since tinkered with the concept, but the company's move helped set the global industry's basic understanding of complex technologies like 5G millimeter wave and midband spectrum.
And T-Mobile isn't the only company that has set its own definitions for 5G technologies.
For example, in the early days of 5G, AT&T officials decided to rebrand the company's LTE network as "5Ge." The move allowed AT&T to offer its customers a 5G-branded signal without having to launch expensive 5G equipment. The move earned the company plenty of criticism, but it also helped AT&T keep pace with its rivals in the court of public opinion.
Similarly, Verizon at one point in its own 5G journey began a nationwide advertising campaign for its millimeter wave 5G network. At the time, that network covered less than 1% of Americans.
And virtually every 5G operator today limits its "unlimited" data in one way or another.
Meaning, there's no right answer here. In fact, the only real arbiter that's even worth mentioning is the National Advertising Division (NAD) in the US, which in the 1970s developed a system of independent industry self-regulation. It's basically a review board that calls BS on ads that are just too far out there. I doubt it would even bat an eye at T-Mobile's new 5G-Advanced claims.
Article updated March 7 to clarify that T-Mobile has not yet launched 5G-Advanced but will do so soon.
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