T-Mobile US wove a series of seemingly incongruent projections into a marathon presentation for analysts and investors. The operator is somehow lowering investments on its 5G network by 2023 while ramping up the pace of deployments, saving more money on its merger with Sprint than originally anticipated, increasing forward-looking revenue guidance, and shutting down Sprint’s network a year ahead of plan. 

“Our network enhancement is running at a truly unprecedented pace and efficiency with some 1,000 radios underway each and every week, a process that we have worked tirelessly to develop and execute, and that took much of the last two years to fully implement,” Neville Ray, the operator’s president of technology, said during its analyst event. 

T-Mobile said its low-band 5G network will reach 300 million people by the end of 2021, and 97% of U.S. residents by the end of 2022. More importantly, T-Mobile’s Ultra Capacity 5G network riding on mid-band spectrum will cover 200 million people by the end of 2021, more than 250 million people by the end of 2022, and 90% of U.S. residents by the end of 2023, according to the company. T-Mobile’s mid-band network currently covers 125 million people, Ray said.

From a capex perspective, T-Mobile will be “largely done” with nationwide 5G deployment activities by 2022, CFO Peter Osvaldik said. The carrier is maintaining its previous capex guidance in the range of $11.7 billion to $12 billion for 2021 and 2022, respectively, but it plans to lower capex to a range of $9 billion to $10 billion per year from 2023 to 2026, he added. 

Those figures also include all expected costs for 5G deployments on its recently acquired C-band spectrum that won’t be available for commercial use until 2023. “I doubt you’ll hear anyone else in the industry lower their expected capex intensity while adding C-band deployments,” Osvaldik said.

Part of T-Mobile’s 5G network upgrade involves the integration of thousands of former Sprint cell sites and the decommissioning of many others. The operator said it will decommission up to 8,000 macro cell sites by the end of this year and it plans to take 35,000 macro sites offline by the end of 2022. That decommissioning effort will generate about $3 billion in run-rate synergies alone, according to T-Mobile.

Now that its merger with Sprint has been closed for almost a full year, T-Mobile’s outlook has grown considerably. It expects total synergies generated from the deal to surpass $70 billion, up 62% from the $43 billion it originally outlined three years ago. 

T-Mobile is also integrating the two businesses and respective networks at least one year faster than expected with a full decommissioning of Sprint’s network slated for the middle of next year. The operator said it will have at least 85,000 active macro radio access network (RAN) sites and 50,000 small cells when its network upgrade is complete.

The operator is currently using 60 megahertz of its roughly 160 megahertz of nationwide 2.5 GHz spectrum and it will increase that usage to 100 megahertz this year, Ray said. That boost in spectrum usage will increase average download speeds from 300 Mb/s to 400 Mb/s, he claimed. T-Mobile will, heading into 2022, still have about 60 megahertz of untapped 2.5 GHz spectrum nationwide and 40 megahertz of C-band spectrum in major U.S. markets that cover about 225 million people. 

T-Mobile also holds licenses for millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, but it gave no indication that it plans to increase deployments on those holdings at any significant level in the next few years. The top layer of T-Mobile’s three-layer cake 5G network strategy is, and will effectively remain, unbaked or at least unfrosted.

The operator pointed to a few areas where it intends to capture growth in the coming years. T-Mobile said it has a “low teens” market share in smaller and rural U.S. markets, a total segment it scopes out to be 50 million U.S. households, and it plans to increase its share to nearly 20% in five years with an increased retail presence and broader network footprint.

T-Mobile’s business services unit has a current market share below 10% and it expects to increase that to about 20% in five years as well. Moreover, on the fixed wireless front, T-Mobile said it intends to surpass 7 million customers within five years and it will share more details about its fixed wireless plans later this month.

Interestingly, T-Mobile’s executive team was reticent to include private networks, mobile edge compute, massive IoT, or advanced 5G use cases in its financial outlook. This cautious approach differs significantly from Verizon, which earlier this week claimed the total addressable market for private edge compute will reach $1 billion by the end of 2022, and up to $10 billion by 2025.

“That still leaves upside for us in a number of the opportunity areas … as well as so many unforeseen 5G opportunities that we can only imagine,” CEO Mike Sievert said. 

T-Mobile’s network and growth strategy is markedly different from its competitors AT&T and Verizon. 

Instead of searching for new revenue from underdeveloped services, the carrier is deliberately targeting growth in established segments where it’s historically underperformed: business, rural areas and small towns, and home broadband. The operator also continues to downplay the importance of mmWave spectrum, effectively kicking the opportunity down the road and limiting it to specialized use cases or extremely dense environments.