The head of the North American market for Ericsson called it rather succinctly this week: 5G networks in the U.S. are not awesome. AT&T, T-Mobile US, and Verizon, have deployed “nationwide” 5G networks that provide a platform to continue building upon, but plenty of work remains, Ericsson SVP Niklas Heuveldop said during a presentation for analysts and investors. 

That collection of 5G networks, “in itself doesn’t deliver an awesome customer experience yet — it’s comparable to 4G,” he said. U.S. carriers, and T-Mobile most aggressively,  are working to improve 5G with mid-band spectrum deployments. 

Without describing the operator by name, Heuveldop explained that T-Mobile is committed to reaching 100 million people with its mid-band network by the end of the year. Neville Ray, the carrier’s president of technology, recently said T-Mobile will provide “nationwide” coverage on its mid-band network by the end of 2021. 

“There will be a significant mid-band network built up, and here is where you see real 5G performance, 7-10x what you see in 4G. The ultra-high performance where you see 20x-plus throughput and millisecond latency comes from the millimeter-wave (mmWave)” spectrum, Heuveldop said. 

Ericsson has thus far helped U.S. operators collectively deploy high-band 5G networks in 71 cities, he added, lending credence to a strategy most vocally shared by T-Mobile about the need to build 5G around three layers of spectrum in the low, mid, and high bands. 

“The challenges we're seeing is that of course we need to see more mid-band spectrum being allocated. A lot of work is now going on with dynamic spectrum sharing technologies,” he said, pointing to a technology that has been central to AT&T and Verizon’s low-band 5G deployments. T-Mobile’s low-band 5G network is riding on unencumbered spectrum.

Meanwhile, mmWave 5G deployments are “being held back by zoning and permitting” issues, according to Heuveldop.

Spectrum availability across low-, mid-, and high-band spectrum is a prerequisite for 5G operators to achieve maximum performance, CEO Börje Ekholm explained later during a question-and-answer session. “If you only work on utilizing the lower band, for example, and don’t have the mid- and high-band you’re not going to get the throughput and the downlink performance, or the experience” that a customer might expect, he said. 

“There are many different ways to go about this, but typically the way we see it is that you would work out the mid-band coverage in large areas. You would combine them then with the low-band and aggregate those carriers together to both utilize the mid-band, but also enhance the performance of that mid-band by connecting it up to the low-band because you get better coverage by doing that,” Ekholm explained. 

Operators in China and Korea have started their 5G deployments with mid-band spectrum coverage, and European carriers have built fairly limited coverage in the mid-band to date, he said. 

The 5G journey for U.S. operators thus far has been more scattershot. Verizon began with a heavy push on mmWave, T-Mobile pushed hard to reach “nationwide” coverage on its fresh low-band spectrum holdings, and AT&T landed somewhere in between those strategies. In each case, the respective operator made use of what was available at the time. 

With T-Mobile’s mid-band efforts already underway, and operators eyeing the upcoming C-Band auction, Ekholm said Ericsson expects mid-band spectrum deployments to reach a critical mass by early next year.