- Trials in San Diego aim to validate XR tech in several key aspects
- T-Mobile’s commercial 5G standalone network is making it all happen
- It’s yet another annoying reminder of T-Mobile’s leadership in 5G SA
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA – It’s T-Mobile’s world and we’re just occupying it for a few days here at MWC this week. That’s because the “un-carrier” is the first in the world to deploy a nationwide 5G standalone (SA) network and it’s getting a lot of attention from attendees near and far during this week’s cellular industry shindig.
Nokia kicked things off on Sunday highlighting T-Mobile’s achievements with President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson – and the stage was set.
Introducing XR trials
To get a better idea of how the 5G SA network will support wearables, T-Mobile is conducting trials with Ericsson and Qualcomm in San Diego. At the center of the trials are AI immersive, lightweight smart glasses powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon tech with Hololight’s XR streaming service.
According to Ericsson, these XR trials aim to validate a few things, including network readiness for a seamless XR experience. They’ll also be proving out 5G Advanced features, like network slicing, for its low latency and advanced schedulers.
It’s not T-Mobile’s first foray with glasses. A couple years back it started selling Ray-Ban glasses to the diehard AR/VR fans. “It was surprising. I never thought that we’d be selling Ray-Bans, but we sold tens of thousands of those,” Ankur Kapoor, chief network officer at T-Mobile, told Fierce on the sidelines of MWC.
“I think there's lots of consumer eagerness to get to use many of these cool things. These are early adopters,” Kapoor said. “This will only get better from here on.”
It’s all about 5G SA
The trials are yet another reminder of T-Mobile’s leadership in 5G SA coverage.
Kapoor started as a radio engineer at T-Mobile decades ago, so he’s seen the good times as well as the bad. Twenty years ago, T-Mobile was almost a technology behind everyone else.
“When people were doing LTE, we were still doing 3G, back in 2011, 2012. This is what I call our journey from last to first, or last to best,” he said.
The acquisition of Sprint and the 5G era gave T-Mobile another go of it, allowing it to leapfrog the competition in a lot of ways. Nowadays, there’s a kind of curiosity about how they were able to do it, especially among the many industry professionals attending MWC from geographies all over the world.
Kapoor tries to remain humble. “I think everybody wants to understand. Everybody wants to meet with us. They try to understand what we’re doing,” he said.
It helps that T-Mobile got an early start with its “layer cake” strategy, aggressively rolling out 5G on low-band 600 MHz spectrum and later supercharging that with its 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum acquired from Sprint, noted Ookla analyst Luke Kehoe.
“We’ve really seen that as kind of a winning strategy in the market,” he told Fierce. “T Mobile really stands out to us as actually a global leader when you look at both reach and performance in that they've identified a balance between very high speed and very far reach.”
Way-back machine
In some ways, these XR tests are a long timing coming. Neville Ray, the former president of Technology at T-Mobile who left the company in 2023, on more than one occasion shared his enthusiasm for wearables and what might be coming down the pike in the form of smart apparel, biometric devices, AR/VR glasses, headsets and the like.
Of course, that didn’t seem to happen as fast as everybody might have anticipated (Metaverse, anyone?), but that’s par for the course. Who knows? Maybe a few years from now, everybody will be wondering what all the hullaballoo was about AI.
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