C-Band and mid-band 5G: What it is, and why it's important for your next phone

[MrGEEK]

Alot of people have trouble understanding exactly what 5G is. Things get even more complicated when you consider its many forms and bands. Carriers all started out with the flashiest and fastest 5G with mmWave in a few select areas, but it wasn't until Sprint showed off its mid-band 5G in mid-2019 that it became clear that 5G could realistically cover a city while offering vastly improved speeds over LTE.

T-Mobile has taken over Sprint's 5G spectrum and has used it to add speed and capacity to its relatively slow low-band 5G network. This has allowed T-Mobile an early lead in 5G coverage. More than 200 million people are now covered by T-Mobile's mid-band 5G, giving the carrier a serious lead in 5G. But AT&T and Verizon started to ramp up deployment of their own mid-band 5G networks with C-band in early 2021.

To keep a long story short, lower frequencies travel further, allowing carriers to provide coverage with fewer towers. This spectrum starts as low as 600MHz but isn't available in very large chunks, meaning that speeds are more in line with LTE speeds. Mid-band spectrum requires many more towers to provide coverage, which means deployment will take longer as more equipment must be set up and more land usage rights must be acquired.

T-Mobile's Sprint-based mid-band uses 2.5GHz spectrum, lower than the 3.7GHz to 3.9GHz the carriers got from the C-band auction; but it shows just how valuable this spectrum will be to 5G going forward. While C-band will require more towers than T-Mobile's current mid-band spectrum, it should also come with better speeds and support for more users once it's deployed. It's also worth remembering that T-Mobile has also bought some large chunks of C-band spectrum to improve capacity in key areas that need it.

At the end of the day, each carrier paid billions of dollars for access to this spectrum, and the initial tests from publications like Tom's Guide have shown promising results. Speeds from this early test peaked over 1Gbps, with other results showing closer to 600Mbps.

While gigabit speeds are meaningless on a mobile phone, it's important to remember that once the service is formally launched, everyone in the area with a compatible phone will be sharing the connection, so the extra capacity will help keep speeds high.

Mid-band spectrum is important to carriers because it helps them deliver on the promise of 5G as a true next-generation network, but also so it can keep up as more and more people upgrade to 5G and start using the tech. All of this is also possible without reducing the capacity for LTE devices, which some people will continue to use for years.

To be continued...