T-Mobile has flipped the switch on its 5G network, setting it live over areas of the US that it says covers 200 million people. While the network is supposedly live today, no one is going to be using it until later this week: the first two phones to support it go on sale this Friday.
The “nationwide” 5G deployment relies on a slower form of 5G, using T-Mobile’s 600MHz spectrum. This “low-band” 5G essentially takes airwaves like the ones used for LTE and bundles them together with some new technology to deliver faster speeds (although T-Mobile doesn’t actually appear to state anywhere what kind of speeds people should expect at launch).
