T-Mobile US didn’t want to be left out of the 5G mix this week amid the C-band brouhaha that doesn’t impact its 5G story as much as rivals AT&T and Verizon.

The carrier boasted a mid-band 5G footprint that covers at least 210 million people, reflecting yet another steady increase of its "Ultra Capacity 5G." Verizon, T-Mobile’s closest rival on mid-band 5G, pledged to unleash a trove of C-band spectrum on its 5G network later this month to cover 100 million people.

Verizon’s accelerated deployment plan came after it and AT&T butted heads with federal regulators as 2022 got underway, but quickly compromised and agreed to yet another C-band spectrum deployment delay.

T-Mobile was temporarily overlooked during all the drama, but ended the week sharing strong performance metrics and couldn’t resist the opportunity to reiterate how far ahead it is from its competitors on mid-band 5G coverage. 

“We’re going to continue to be two years ahead of the game,” T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik said at Citi’s Apps Economy conference, according to a transcript. “We’re building the network that can definitely cover everybody and has the capacity,” he claimed. 

Whereas T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G network currently rides on 100 megahertz of spectrum, Verizon only has access to 60 megahertz until late 2023, Osvaldik explained. 

By late 2023, T-Mobile intends to cover more than 300 million people with an average depth of 200 megahertz of mid-band spectrum. Verizon has committed to cover 175 million people by late 2023, and AT&T claims its mid-band 5G network will reach 200 million people by that time.

T-Mobile’s lead on mid-band 5G is a direct result of its 2020 acquisition of Sprint, which came with vast spectrum holdings in the 2.5 GHz band. C-band spectrum, which T-Mobile also won licenses for in last year’s auction, runs in the 3.7 GHz-3.9 GHz band but the operator isn’t reliant on C-band availability like AT&T and Verizon. 

As such, T-Mobile remains best positioned in the U.S. market, given its 5G network capabilities and the only U.S. operator with a 5G standalone core to date, to showcase advanced network services for mobile edge compute, private networks, and fixed wireless access, Osvaldik said. 

“We’re very excited about how this competitive differentiator for us is going to continue for the next couple of years,” he said. “I believe capex will likely be higher year over year as we race to implement and really create this network even faster than we planned.”

He later reiterated that T-Mobile’s 2022 capex will be higher than its 2021 capex, but he declined to provide full-year guidance. 

T-Mobile also announced its low-band 5G network now covers more than 310 million people. And finally, it boasted a total of 646,000 fixed wireless access customers at the close of 2021, surpassing its target of 500,000 subscribers.