Sprint on Thursday became the first cellular carrier to offer generally available 5G mobile service in Houston with a network the company said covers 165 square miles of the city and more than 800,000 people.

In doing so, Sprint beats its rivals to market with an offering of the next-generation mobile data service. AT&T announced mobile 5G service late last year, but it remains an invitation-only product. Verizon only sells 5G service for home users in Houston, and T-Mobile has yet to roll out 5G of any kind.

The Houston Sprint 5G network footprint covers most of the area inside Loop 610, then west just past the Sam Houston Tollway. The eastern, northern and much of the southern parts of the city are, so far, not covered.

“We expect to build those areas out in the next 18 months,” said Scott Santi, Sprint’s senior vice president of engineering and deployment, at a launch event in downtown Houston Thursday.

Sprint also kicked off service in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Kansas City area on Thursday. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., are expected to get it “the coming weeks.”

5G HARDWARE: Sprint to begin selling 5G smartphone, hotspot

Earlier this month, Sprint said it would begin selling a 5G-capable smartphone and hotspot on Friday. The $1,152 LG V50 ThinQ 5G smartphone will require Sprint’s $80-a-month Unlimited Premium plan to work with the new network. Its mobile hotspot, the $600 HTC 5G Hub, requires a $60-a-month plan with 100 gigabytes of data.

The data plan includes access to the Hulu video service, Amazon Prime and Tidal HiFi. Hatch, a mobile streaming game service, is also included.

Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G, which sells for $1,300, will be available for Sprint’s network this summer.

A Sprint spokesperson said users with 5G-capable hardware could see peak speeds of 1 gigabit per second, with general download speeds around 100 Mbps. The carrier's national average for downloads is 30 Mbps.

During a tour of the downtown area on a bus outfitted with screens and the LG and HTC devices, speed tests showed downloads ranging from 200 Mbps to more than 700 Mbps. However, upload speed tests were anemic, typically coming in between 2 and 3.5 Mbps.

By comparison, an iPhone XS Max connecting to T-Mobile’s LTE network in the same area had a download speed of 77.2 Mbps and an upload speed of 51.3 Mbps.

The successor to the current wireless data standard, LTE, 5G is expected to bring much faster speeds and less lag to the mobile experience. The advance is a result of a collection of technologies ranging from the use of dense collections of antennas in urban areas to improved connections to the internet, known as backhaul, throughout the network.

5G AT HOME: Houston couple first in U.S. to get Verizon 5G broadband

Sprint is using a part of the radio spectrum called mid-band that has greater range and is better at penetrating buildings. Santi said it will work better in suburban and rural areas than higher-frequency millimeter wave signals, which some of its competitors are using.

Santi also said Sprint is swapping out older LTE antennas with newer 5G models on its existing towers, which improves service for LTE customers as well.

Sprint and T-Mobile are planning a merger and are waiting for regulatory approval. Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has indicated he is in favor of the deal. But news reports have indicated the Department of Justice is skeptical of the merger’s benefits with fewer competitors in the mobile arena.

T-Mobile and Sprint have pledged not to raise prices for three years after the merger is complete. And on Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department wants the companies to spin off a new competitor to keep the number of top providers at four.

The faster buildout of a nationwide 5G network is one of the merger selling points being touted by both T-Mobile and Sprint. During the Houston presentation, John Stevens, southern region president for Sprint, repeated that claim and added that its competitors so far are bringing “5G to a few”.

“Sprint is now bringing 5G to many,” Stevens said. “Sprint combined with T-Mobile can bring 5G to all.”

Sascha Segan, lead mobile analyst for PCMag, said the companies’ claim about building out a better network more quickly after a merger is true.

“The question is, will this result in reduced competition, and down the line higher prices and lost retail jobs?” Segan said. “If all the cell phone companies combined into one, they could build an absolutely beautiful network. But what prices would that monopoly company charge?”

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