The wind in T-Mobile US’ sails is a long-duration breeze, not a short burst gust or squall. The operator, following its long and hard fought battle to acquire Sprint in 2020, closed the year with sustained performance and an outlook that puts it markedly ahead of AT&T and Verizon. 

“In a quarter when Verizon sacrificed growth for profitability and AT&T sacrificed profit growth for customer growth, only T-Mobile delivered customer growth and profitability, beating consensus on both,” CEO Mike Sievert on the company’s fourth-quarter 2020 earnings call. “It looks like only T-Mobile is expected to deliver both again in meaningful ways again this year.”

Sievert didn’t share any new details about the current reach of T-Mobile’s 5G network beyond what he shared at an investor conference at the beginning of the year, but he did indicate that 2021 will be a year of more heightened activity on that front.

T-Mobile’s low-band 5G network covers 280 million people across 1.6 million square miles, and its "Ultra Capacity" 5G network riding on mid-band spectrum covers 106 million people. The operator maintains that it will meet or exceed its goal of covering 200 million people with its Ultra Capacity 5G network by the end of 2021. 

“The country has never seen anything like this network build. We’re tracking ahead of schedule and the results are clearly beginning to differentiate, not just on 5G, but on network performance overall,” Sievert said.

Neville Ray, the operator’s president of technology, also boasted about the “network machine” T-Mobile has been developing since 2018. “We have the machines, we have the resources, the supply chain, the commitments, and we have the processes. And so, this machine is moving at real pace. 200 million people covered with Ultra Capacity is going to be a huge lead against what our competition has talked about or said they can do,” he said. 

T-Mobile engineers physically touched and upgraded thousands of sites to deploy and then expand its nationwide 5G footprint on low-band spectrum, but 5G deployment on mid-band spectrum is even more involved, Sievert explained. “That’s now moving to tens of thousands of sites in 2021, tens of thousands of macro sites with Ultra Capacity 5G, it’s a massive undertaking,” he said. 

The operator’s pace of 5G deployment is “a real competitive differentiator,” Sievert said, claiming that T-Mobile’s technical leaders and engineers are deploying and operating a network at a scale that’s never been accomplished before in the U.S.

T-Mobile banked $750 million in net income, flat year over year, on $20.3 billion in revenue during the quarter. Revenues are less comparable on a year-over-year basis because it’s now a much larger company following the merger with Sprint.

On that front, T-Mobile said it’s exceeding expectations on savings achieved through the merger. The operator realized $1.3 billion of synergies in 2020, including $600 million in saved marketing costs and approximately $700 million in network synergies by avoiding new cellular site builds and the early decommissioning of other sites. 

It expects to achieve synergies of $2.7 billion to $3 billion in 2021. The operator also said 25% of Sprint postpaid customer traffic has been moved to the T-Mobile network and more than 4 million former Sprint customers have been fully migrated. 

T-Mobile spent $3.8 billion in capex during Q4, which was up 71% year over year, and it expects 2021’s full year capex to land in the range of $11.7 billion to $12 billion. The operator booked $500 million in costs related to the COVID-19 crisis, and indicated those costs are now considered annual run-rate costs for the business. 

“The T-Mobile story is a compelling one. The industry’s lowest prices and, soon (perhaps even already) the industry’s best network,” analysts at MoffettNathanson concluded.