T-Mobile teams up with Ericsson on its 5G network, as Ericsson has just announced at Mobile World Congress 2018 that it will work with the U.S.’ third-largest wireless carrier to assist it in rolling out a multi-band 5G network across the country. While T-Mobile will be doing a lot of the legwork in terms of actually getting the network up and running Ericsson will be aiding the carrier with the tools to get the job done. Specifically Ericsson has announced that it will be providing T-Mobile with 5G radio access products based on the 3GPP 5G new radio standard.
With these new products T-Mobile will be able to start rolling out its 5G network in the U.S. this year, and the products that Ericsson will be providing will support varying 5G network frequencies that T-Mobile will be operating, which includes the 600MHz and millimeter-wave networks in both 28GHz and 39GHz. Though T-Mobile plans to roll out its 5G network in 30 different cities across the U.S. by the end of 2018, Ericsson is only going to be working with T-Mobile on 5G network rollout efforts in a few different locations. These will be Las Vegas, Los Angeles , and New York with the help of Ericsson’s 5G NR radios as well as its baseband all built on the Ericsson 5G platform.
In addition to the hardware Ericsson will also be providing software that T-Mobile will be working with to deploy its 5G network, called the 5G Radio Access Network commercial software, which Ericsson says will be available sometime in the fourth quarter of this year. This may give some insight as to when T-Mobile may actually be able to get its 5G network deployed in the above-mentioned areas where Ericsson will be helping it. If that ends up being the case it’s unclear if these will be the first cities that T-Mobile rolls its 5G network out in, though considering Ericsson’s software will help T-Mobile with the job and won’t be available until around October 2018, T-Mobile will either be deploying its 5G network in some of the other cities first or it’ll start with Las Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles and then quickly roll things out to other cities in the remaining part of the year.