T-Mobile always seems to be touting that they have the best nationwide 5G network. The team at PCMag just confirmed that in a recent test. Now, they’ve taken to the streets again since T-Mobile just took another major step in expanding their network. Starting in New York, T-Mobile has installed 100MHz of standalone 5G, which is unencumbered by legacy 4G systems.
Why is this important exactly? Even at this point in the 5G rollout, most 5G systems are still running off 4G networks. This might be why you sometimes see more bandwidth from your LTE devices in comparison to your 5G ones. It’s also why you haven’t seen consistently lower latency and quality of service through network slicing yet.
The sooner we can move 5G off the 4G system completely, the sooner we’ll start to see the new applications 5G has been promising. Things like augmented or virtual reality. Standalone 5G is going to be necessary for these technologies to work.
While using standalone 5G is not something new for T-Mobile, they’ve only just started using Band n41. Prior to this, they had leveraged the longer-range, but lower capacity of Band n71. By utilizing the fast standalone n41, T-Mobile can have flexibility, capacity, and speed all together.
In their tests, PCMag saw standalone n41 on several sites across central Syracuse, from the university campus to nearby downtown blocks. On the map below, the light blue color is the standalone 5G; the rest are mixes of 5G and 4G. Surprisingly, performance was similar to what you get from T-Mobile’s “5G UC” elsewhere. They received 310-382Mbps down, 52Mbps up, and 27-34ms latency.
It turns out the PCMag team randomly found what T-Mobile called a “live engineering test site,” there in Syracuse. They discovered that in addition to testing standalone band n41, they were also testing standalone band n25. They’re even working on combining n25 and n41 using carrier aggregation.
