T-Mobile US stands to decommission more cell sites than it activates this year as it wraps up a complicated integration with Sprint’s older network infrastructure.

“We decommissioned thousands of sites last year, but 2022 is the year where we kind of close out all of that decommissioning activity,” Neville Ray, the carrier’s president of technology, said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.

T-Mobile still plans to remove about 80% of Sprint’s cell sites and upgrade the remaining sites it’s keeping from the portfolio. T-Mobile acquired Sprint in April 2020.

It’s a complicated process, involving site-by-site calculations based on customer impact resulting from site abandonment paired with T-Mobile’s timeline for boosting or upgrading coverage in each region with new equipment for 5G service, Ray explained.

“This year there are tens of thousands of sites that we’re in a position to decommission. And that’s always been a key underlying thesis on this deal. We still emerge from all of that decommissioning activity with the largest network in the U.S.,” he boasted.

“We’re well on our way to 260 million people covered by the end of this year. 300 million by the end of 2023. Our competition has no announced plans to get even close to that,” Ray added.

The bulk of T-Mobile’s 5G radio access network (RAN) runs on macro cells, but the company still anticipates a small cell footprint in the range of 50,000 small cells.

“This plan is macro based. Those are the physics. We are not building 5G on the back of small cell millimeter-wave (mmWave) sites. We’re doing that where it makes sense,” Ray said.

He then, as he is wont to do, contrasted that with Verizon’s early 5G strategy, which relied heavily on mmWave deployments.

Verizon’s mmWave 5G network carries “way less than 1% of the traffic we carry on our network,” Ray said. “For a 33,000 site investment with fiber, that math don’t work the way I look at it, and the way we run our business.”

Where Verizon’s mmWave 5G network does exist, largely in urban areas, it’s carrying more than 10% of all traffic, Bill Stone, Verizon’s VP of technology planning and development, told SDxCentral in a recent phone interview.

T-Mobile’s more expansive mid-band 5G footprint also positions it for greater opportunities in fixed wireless access and customers in less-populated areas, according to Ray. 

The combination with Sprint, particularly its spectrum holdings, allowed T-Mobile to significantly increase its capacity. “No wireless company has gone through a migration where you’ve not just increased your capacity by an order of magnitude, but 14x,” he said. 

That leaves T-Mobile with excess capacity for other uses, including in-home broadband. “That never existed in an LTE domain. Every carrier was just trying to keep up with traditional wireless capacity,” Ray added.

“The economics are the same on these sites. A 2.5 GHz radio can support up to 200 megahertz of bandwidth so we can deploy that same radio in the core of Manhattan or in rural Kansas for the same economics effectively,” he said.