T-Mobile US this week indicated that it’s increasingly positioning itself for a broader foray into the cloud and mobile edge computing space.

The operator’s current 5G strategy is almost entirely focused on building an expansive network as quickly as possible. Other advancements promised to arrive in the 5G era like mobile edge computing are effectively viewed as a later opportunity, something still underdeveloped, but the operator suggests that could change later this year. 

T-Mobile expects the cloud to fuel 5G use cases for enterprises and individuals, according to CEO Mike Sievert. “Enterprises don’t want to be buying and deploying assets, they want to have networking as a service, they want to have computing as a service, and that does raise very interesting prospects for our business as it relates to being able to ultimately serve enterprise customers with networking as a service,” he said.

Points of intersect between mobile networks and the cloud is a “fascinating area that our business model doesn’t rely on yet, but we won’t be left behind on,” Sievert said, adding that he believes T-Mobile’s advantage on 5G will be a differentiator. “The more enterprise customers and consumer applications rely on the cloud, the more our network shines and it really showcases a potential tailwind for the future.” 

T-Mobile inked a deal with Lumen Technologies last month, marking its first formal entry into the mobile edge computing space, but details were light and the effort is limited to opportunities that might interest businesses and government agencies under Lumen’s enterprise unit and T-Mobile for Business.

“We’ve already begun engagements with customers so we’re working on some use cases. I expect to have something to talk about that later in the year when those come into market,” Mike Katz, EVP at T-Mobile for Business, said on company’s first quarter of 2021 earnings call.

“We think there’s a lot of exciting potential there to really help enterprises transform parts of their business and bring new services to their customers, so more to come on that,” Katz said. 

Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G network deployments are moving along and the operator claims it has avoided supply chain disruptions that are causing concern among at least one of its competitors. Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile, suggested that the operator’s earlier start on mid-band 5G deployments has resulted in many advantages, including the supply chain.

“The supply chain is very strong at this point in time on the network side, no issues for us there at all,” he said. Conversely, AT&T CEO John Stankey last month said he’s “a little skittish” about constraints and ongoing challenges in the global supply chain, but said he doesn’t currently expect that to impact AT&T’s mid-band deployment plans. 

“On supply chain from a network perspective, maybe this is the advantage we have because we started our program so much earlier, and we put massive commitments, multi-billion dollar commitments into the market with our key vendors in Ericsson and Nokia,” Ray said. “We’re accelerating the pace of deployment, we’re deploying more radio gear than we ever have, at a pace that’s much faster than we’ve seen in our past.”

Indeed, T-Mobile’s 5G story is strengthening, and many of the goals it pledged to realize as a result of its merger with Sprint are beginning to materialize. “T-Mobile is positioned to maintain our 5G leadership for the duration of the 5G era, thanks to our superior spectrum portfolio, our unprecedented deployment momentum, and our synergy-backed model,” Sievert said.

The company continues to increase guidance on the pace at which it will generate savings from the merger as well. It now expects synergies from the network-integration effort this year to fall in the range of $2.8 billion to $3.1 billion. Total synergies generated from the deal are expected to surpass $70 billion, which is up 62% from the $43 billion it originally outlined three years ago. 

While many of Sprint’s heaviest users have been transitioned to T-Mobile’s network, it’s only moved about 20% of that entire customer base to its network with compatible phones. The operator has to move the remaining 80% of Sprint’s customer base to its network before it shuts down its CDMA network, which is slated for later this year or early next year. 

T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G network now covers more than 40% of the U.S. population, and about half of all Sprint customer traffic is now carried on its network. The operator achieved both of those feats in one year, following its long and hard-fought battle to acquire Sprint.

A low-band 5G network riding on 600 MHz spectrum, which T-Mobile US began deploying in December 2019, now reaches 295 million people, or almost 90% of the U.S. population. 

The operator is undeniably beating its competitors AT&T and Verizon on critical 5G-related measures, including coverage and pace of deployment.

“The pace that we’ve secured we intend to maintain and accelerate as we go through the balance of this year and into next. Our nationwide goal is right there for us, for 2021 to reach 200 million people, and speeds will continue to improve,” Ray said. 

“By the end of this year we’ll be committing 100 megahertz on 2.5 GHz spectrum to that 5G service and Ultra Capacity 5G,” he said. “We’ve always talked about speeds hitting 400 Mb/s plus on average, and that’s a target clearly in our sights and one we would hope to get to by the end of this year.”