T-Mobile US appears to be the busiest and most overachieving mobile network operator in the country, if not the world. During the next three to four years it plans to spend $40 billion upgrading network infrastructure spanning at least 50,000 cell sites, push coverage deeper into rural America, and deliver a fixed broadband footprint that reaches half of U.S. households.

“I’ve never had this level of production in terms of radio upgrades and programs running through the team,” Neville Ray, the operator’s president of technology, said during an investor conference today.

The prizes achieved through that effort, riding in part on its recently closed merger with Sprint and its coveted mid-band spectrum, are both short and long term. The operator last week activated the world’s first standalone (SA) 5G network operating on a 5G core, and its cell site upgrade activity is accelerating amid an ongoing COVID-19 crisis that is fueling uncertainty and disrupting guidance throughout the industry. 

“This deal always brought us two just incredible opportunities as we combine these companies,” Ray said. “Just on network alone that synergy run rate is $4 billion. That’s our pre-deal estimate, so that’s an annual run rate of $4 billion as we effectively collapse two sets of fixed assets into one.”

CFO Peter Osvaldik noted that the company is already benefiting from the combination with Sprint by avoiding unnecessary site deployments and expects to capture even greater savings through redundant site decommissions on the back half of its network integration project, which it expects to wrap up before the end of the current quarter.

“The second prize is that this is finally the time of 5G. Every dollar that we’re investing in our network is accelerating our path to synergies while at the same time accelerating what I will claim is our leadership in 5G today,” Ray said. “We’re out there with a network, which is reaching 250 million people across the U.S., 1.3 million square miles. … It’s the most advanced with the standalone architecture and that’s just the low-band piece. We’re now adding to that materially depth of spectrum with Sprint’s rich 2.5 GHz spectrum that we started to roll out April 1.”

In addition to broadening its coverage footprint and boosting speeds, T-Mobile is ramping up efforts to deploy 5G on that mid-band spectrum, he said, adding that the 2.5 GHz rollout will be a multi-year project because it’s expanding connectivity in metropolitan and rural areas throughout the county. 

“This is a massive network transformation,” Ray said. “We have a huge ambition to really go penetrate the broadband business and to become a great supplier of broadband capability in rural America where, if we’re honest with ourselves, choice is just goddamn awful today, price wise, performance wise.”

T-Mobile is starting radio upgrades on 700 sites per week now and hopes to hit a run rate of 800 per week soon, according to Ray. Its low-band rollout on 600 MHz spectrum has already reached tens of thousands of sites, forming its 5G footprint. 

“That’s a relatively straightforward upgrade. We have 700 MHz on a lot of those sites, so we change out our radio for a dual-mode, dual-band capability, he said, adding that the low-band deployments will continue through 2021.

The newer program on 2.5 GHz spectrum requires engineers and tower climbers to install new radios, and upgrade backhaul and power components. “The work can be done in just under 10 business days. It’s kind of 5-10 business days depending on the complexity of the site,” Ray said.

“People think we’re up against building new steel, stacking 200-foot towers or monopoles. I’m not. I’m hanging radios and I’m adding antennas onto generally existing infrastructure, be that towers or be that rooftop structures across the U.S.,” he said, adding that T-Mobile wants to reach key urban and metropolitan areas with those deployments next year. 

“Our spectrum position is one to be envious of across the industry. I can’t have a bad day now,” Ray said. “I wake up in the morning, there’s a smile on my face because I’ve finally got a great set of spectrum assets and I’ve been battling away on this network one way or another for 25 years and we’ve never had the size and scale of this opportunity.”

T-Mobile has licenses for more than 319 megahertz of spectrum in sub-6 GHz spectrum and more millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum than AT&T, he said. T-Mobile hasn’t shared much about its future plans for mmWave network deployments, but it consistently rails against Verizon for relying so heavily on that spectrum for its 5G strategy.

Verizon’s spectrum position has subsequently made it especially dependent on dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), a technology that allows operators to use the same spectrum for 4G LTE and 5G.

“We’re not about trying to tell you your LTE network is a 5G network. We never did that,” Ray said. 

Ray and his colleagues are going to be “super busy” working on network upgrades through 2023, and “by the end of this year we will have a multi-thousand site 2.5 GHz network on top of that low-band 5G,” he said. 

Average speeds on T-Mobile’s low-band 5G network are in the range of 40 to 80 Mb/s and in the markets where it has 2.5 GHz deployed now, riding on 60 megahertz of spectrum, average speeds are about 400 Mb/s, according to Ray. T-Mobile will be adding another 20 megahertz of spectrum to those sites, in addition to expanding its total number of site, reaching average speeds of 400 Mb/s by the end of the year, he added. 

“If you painted this false picture that there’s going to be multi-gigabit speeds across the U.S., the three-plus million square miles of it, it’s a fantasy. It’s going to take decades and decades for that to happen,” Ray said.