Mobile World Congress, Barcelona — In Neville Ray’s last hurrah at MWC, he proclaimed that T-Mobile is the “leading 5G network in the U.S,” thanks — in part — to standalone (SA) 5G capabilities.
Building on its nationwide 5G SA network, T-Mobile is launching pure 5G voice calling, which the industry clunkily calls VoNR, in six cities in the U.S. VoNR is starting in Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle. This 5G service will cover 100 million people.
Ray also highlighted that later this year the operator is launching 4-carrier aggregation that combines two channels of 2.5GHz spectrum with two channels of 1900MHz spectrum. The mobile network operator (MNO) has already tested data calls that reached speeds of 3.3 Gbps. It will launch on the Galaxy S23, with more devices to follow.
Neither of these services could be offered without a 5G core. T-Mobile has also worked with Cisco to roll out a cloud-native converged core for its 5G SA and 4G traffic.
Check out our other coverage from Mobile World Congress here:
- Nokia rebrands with its head in the cloud
- Microsoft aims for telcos with next wave of Azure
- Silverlinings kicks off Day 1 at MWC
- NTT on moving 5G from 'carpeted world' to 'factory floor'
- Cisco’s converged future
- AWS plays the middleman between telco and the cloud
- Ericsson wins 5G SA deal in Spain with Orange
- MWC Day 2 wrap-up: 5G SA and core network transformation
- Surprise: F5 is now a cloud company
- MWC Day 3 wrap-up: cloud-native to the core, 5G and more
- Mavenir opens the way to cloud-native
- MWC: Orange Business sheds light on Project Sylva