T-Mobile is just beginning to stretch its legs with its new rural 600MHz network in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Scarborough, Maine, the carrier's CTO Neville Ray told us today. The company plans to cover much more of the country with long-distance, building-penetrating LTE waves this year, and it's using the new network to set the stage for its 5G plans.

This year, T-Mobile plans to launch 600MHz LTE in Wyoming, Northeast and Southwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, additional areas of Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia, and Eastern Washington, the company said. That's a mix of places T-Mobile currently has coverage and places it does not.

According to Ray, Cheyenne and Scarborough were picked essentially as test markets. T-Mobile has coverage there already, but that coverage could be improved.

"We wanted to get our Nokia radio and our Ericsson radio into market testing, so we could get the network up, get the phones in, and get the phones finally tested," he said. The LG V30 will be the first 600MHz phone available later this fall, and it'll be joined by a Samsung phone that hasn't been named yet.

"We're going to look to push every phone we have to support this banding" in the future, Ray said.

Past those cities, "in some of the early areas we're leveraging existing cell sites where we may have coverage but don't have low-band," Ray said. "You're going to see us leveraging existing facilities and capabilities out of the gate, and then the next phase is pushing coverage into areas where we didn't have low-band."

The network won't be slow, either. Ray said T-Mobile has 40MHz of spectrum in many rural markets now, which can give theoretical download speeds of 150Mbps (and, in our experience, consistent downloads of 20-30Mbps.)

T-Mobile's nationwide 600MHz network, which it won at auction earlier this year, finally puts the carrier on theoretical par with AT&T and Verizon when it comes to coverage. Building the nationwide network will be much easier than it used to be, Ray said, because T-Mobile doesn't intend to put up a lot of new cell sites; instead, it can often piggyback on AT&T, Verizon, or utility company infrastructure.

While T-Mobile is moving at blinding speed with 600MHz, there's a brake on the rollout because in some parts of the country, T-Mobile will have to wait for TV stations still occupying the spectrum to move. That could take up to three more years, but the carrier is helping where it can—like paying low-power PBS repeater stations to buy new equipment to change their frequencies, Ray said.

In the short term, roaming will also come into play as T-Mobile aims to cover 321 million Americans by the end of the year. A promised deal with U.S. Cellular, which has strong networks in places like Maine and Iowa where T-Mobile is weak, is waiting on U.S. Cellular to fully support voice-over-LTE, Ray said.

"They're a CDMA network, so we want to make sure there's a voice path available for our customers," he said.

The 600MHz network has one extra twist, too: Ray explained that the new equipment can be software-upgraded to 5G, when the mobile 5G standard is finally set. (T-Mobile is aiming at 2020 for its 5G rollout.) While low-band 5G won't bring the multi-gigabit speeds that have been promised with shorter-range, millimeter-wave 5G, it will enable new business uses like networks of agricultural and pipeline sensors that can be very useful in rural industries.

"A sensor network which has got a battery that lives for five, eight, 10 years out there, that's impossible for LTE," Ray said. We'll test T-Mobile's 600MHz when we can get a phone for it.

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