T-Mobile US’ 5G footprint continues to expand, reaching further into pockets of the country that position the operator for growth in new markets and business segments. Executives continue to press on opportunities in fixed wireless access, enterprises, and communities living in less populated areas of the country.

The carrier’s mid-band 5G network covers 190 million people, delivering average speeds of 400 Mb/s, and its low-band 5G network spans 1.7 million square miles providing coverage to 308 million people. The operator provided the latest figure, reflecting an additional 5 million people covered by mid-band 5G since last week, during its third-quarter of 2021 earnings call. 

“We're leading America into the 5G era as we march toward covering 300 million people with Ultra Capacity 5G by the end of 2023 — a time by which others only aspire to cover 175 to 200 million people,” CEO Mike Sievert said, commenting on AT&T and Verizon’s latest mid-band buildout plans. 

“We’re two years ahead on the 5G race, and I'm here to tell you that in two years from now, we'll be two years or more ahead in the 5G race,” he said. T-Mobile also maintains it’s on pace to cover at least 200 million people with mid-band 5G before the end of this year.

The operator’s mid-band spectrum rollout includes a depth of 100 megahertz of spectrum by the end of this year, and it plans to use 200 megahertz of mid-band spectrum for the network before the end of 2023. More than 75% of current T-Mobile 5G customers are within range of its mid-band 5G network today, Sievert added. 

The total number of mid-band sites deployed for 4G LTE and 5G thus far include about 105,000 macro cell sites and about 39,000 small cells, according to T-Mobile.

This expansive footprint continues to bolster T-Mobile’s optimism for growth in home-based internet, an offering it started rolling out in April 2021. T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is on track to serve at least 500,000 customers by the end of the year and up to 8 million customers by 2025, according to Dow Draper, EVP of the emerging products group at T-Mobile.

Two thirds of home-internet customers that signed up during the quarter came from urban and suburban markets, and about 5% of the fixed wireless access customers are using a terabyte a month, Sievert said. 

“They're also coming from cable and fiber providers,” Draper said. “We see continued momentum from people coming from cable, fiber, and quite frankly, even other sources, DSL, satellite, etcetera in rural markets.” 

The operator also teased some early work on advanced 5G services with large enterprises. It previously said active trials are underway with 12 of the Fortune 50 to develop applications and services for private 5G networks and mobile edge computing. 

T-Mobile Business President Mike Katz noted that T-Mobile’s position as the only U.S. operator with a standalone 5G core allows it to differentiate on 5G use cases, including network slicing. Moreover, he added, “we have a highly distributed network of data centers, so we can help customers process data closer to their application on average than our competitors can.”

Some of these enterprises are “big customers with big, significant use cases,” Katz said. “We’re working with one of the largest airlines in America right now on a mobile edge use case application that allows them to process data faster underwing and improve their on-ground operations at one of their major hubs.”

T-Mobile is also working with one of the country’s largest automakers to support self-driving applications and an autonomous fleet, Katz said.

Executives faced no questions about the company’s inability to stop a cyberattack during the quarter that exposed personal data on at least 54 million people. Sievert, during his prepared remarks, said he created a “cyber transformation office reporting directly to me, elevating our cybersecurity team and this work accordingly.”

While T-Mobile tries to move past the largest carrier breach on record, it remains to be seen how much the operator’s consistently poor security stature might negatively impact its outlook with business customers. The summertime attack marked the fifth publicly acknowledged data breach at T-Mobile in three years. 

Meanwhile, the operator continues to outperform guidance on cost savings realized following its long and hard-fought battle to merge with Sprint in April 2020. The operator raised 2021 merger synergies guidance from a previous range of $2.9 billion to $3.2 billion up to a range of $3.2 billion to $3.2 billion. 

Roughly 90% of Sprint customer traffic is now carried on the T-Mobile network and about 53% of Sprint customers have been fully transitioned to T-Mobile’s services. President of Technology Neville Ray said decommissioning activity across the network will be “substantially complete” next year with the bulk of that work slated to occur in the second half of 2022.

T-Mobile banked $691 million in net income on $19.6 billion in revenue, reflecting a nearly 45% year-over-year decline in profit and 1.8% climb in revenue. Service revenues jumped 4% to $14.7 billion and total opex increased nearly 8% to $18 billion.

T-Mobile ended the quarter with $75.2 billion in net debt and it expects total 2021 capex to end in the range of $12.1 billion to $12.3 billion.