T-Mobile has been doing mmwave on 2 different bands for over a year now in various cities, airports, venues[1][2]. The difference between T-Mobile and Verizon w

T-Mobile has been doing mmwave on 2 different bands for over a year now in various cities, airports, venues[1][2]. The difference between T-Mobile and Verizon was the launch strategy. T-Mobile played it right by not hyping technologies most of the country can't use like LAA (5GHZ) and mmwave. Verizon arguably had the best LTE launch strategy years ago, but yeah... I guess they could afford to botch this. Come to think of it, pre-merger Sprint probably had the best launch strategy which was to launch 5G on mid-band where they had enough spectrum to service both LTE and 5G NR users. Masayoshi Son was too busy flushing his money down other toilets like WeWork and Uber to cut the checks Sprint needed to get it completed nationwide. Sprint also suffered from having 5 or 6 different equipment vendors across the country... where T-Mobile had two. They have been ripping out the NSN 5G equipment from NYC post-merger, because this is a T-Mobile Ericsson market and they don't want to deal with it. AT&T meanwhile got a $100 billion 25yr contract from the post-9/11 telecom pork project, FirstNet[2]. So they've been throwing up tons of new sites with that money over the past year or two. I don't think anyone was thinking about 5G or spectrum planning over there, just focusing on acquiring consumers through acquisitions (Directtv, some crappy Mexican carriers) and getting government contracts. Gov M2M stuff moves slower than Apple at acquiring new modem technologies for their devices, so there's not a huge rush to ramp up 5G. https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network#tech https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network#t... < [1] tmo band listing https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-revs-up-5g-6-cities-using-mmwave-spectrum https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-revs-up-5g-... < [2] News coverage of tmo bandwidth deployment over a year ago. https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2017/03/att-firstnet-award.aspx https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2017... [3] Firstnet contract