T-Mobile grabbed the 5G wave and it’s epic: Ewaldsson

Critics may have proclaimed 5G a flop, but T-Mobile certainly doesn't see it that way. The operator's President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson told the audience at the Mobile Future Forward 2024 that the 5G story isn’t so bad after all. However, Chetan Sharma, the analyst hosting the event, told Fierce not everyone has been so lucky.

Criticism of 5G investments usually goes something like this: Operators spent billions on spectrum and equipment and with the exception of perhaps fixed wireless access (FWA), they’re still looking for the big payback years after deploying the technology.

Ewaldsson is one of the relatively rare individuals with a good 5G story to tell. He recounted how 10 years ago, T-Mobile was dead last in the race for network superiority and its network was full of coverage holes. T-Mobile had a 3G network when everybody else had moved onto 4G LTE.

Then the wave hit.

“5G for us became a wave that we could ride all the way out,” he said. "We went all in from the beginning."

A lot of third parties have chronicled T-Mobile's ascent in 5G. For instance, T-Mobile took top honors for 5G availability and speeds in OpenSignal's July 2024 Mobile Network Experience report. And that's no coincidence. According to Ewalssson approximately 90% of T-Mobile’s towers are now 5G. “That’s enormous," he said.

5G: Good or bad?

That's T-Mobile's experience. For others, 5G hasn't been so rewarding.

In wireless, hype tends to precede every big “G” that comes along, and people are bound to be disappointed. Remember that 3G was supposed to deliver mobile TV in a big way? Some folks joke that “every other G” is successful, so where 4G LTE brought ride-sharing apps and GPS routing, 5G still needs to find its footing.

Mobile Future Forward host Chetan Sharma told Fierce on the sidelines of the event that if revenue is the metric, “then we have done phenomenally well” with 5G.

“We have generated $40 billion since 2019,” which is the same or more than what 4G generated in the first three years, Sharma said.

If you’re using FWA as the metric, it's grown two times faster than any other services, and that hasn’t happened before. However, if you look at 5G enterprise services, that isn't a big revenue generator because folks in the U.S. haven’t focused on it.

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But in China, 5G in the enterprise has been a “massive hit,” he said. “They’ve done great.”

Meanwhile, in India, operators were speedy to launch 5G and they have done tremendously well with the consumer sector.

Those are some of the good stories. Then there are the not-so-good.

“Europe has been a terrible market,” he said. “Very slow to roll out, very slow to get spectrum. That has been a challenge.”

Some of the negativity no doubt stems from the use cases that were used in the U.S. to sell the 5G story, he said. Early on, enterprise use cases were touted and they haven‘t panned out, in part because many operators were slow to move to 5G standalone (SA). But it’s a complex question.

“There’s no easy answer," Sharma concluded. "But from a pure revenue generation point of view, Japan, Korea, China, India and the U.S. have generated positive revenue. I think it just depends on how you look at it.”