T-Mobile expands its faster midband 5G network, nearly doubling its coverage

T-Mobile announced another expansion of its 2.5GHz midband 5G network, which is now available in dozens of new cities, nearly doubling the coverage of its last major midband rollout from the end of September. T-Mobile says that it now has midband 5G support in nearly 410 cities and towns in the United States. T-Mobile’s 5G network combines its widely available 600MHz low-band network (which offers coverage on a nationwide scale but not much in the way of speed improvements of LTE) with the faster 2.5GHz network (which it acquired from Sprint) along with its ultra-fast mmWave network (which has the best speeds but the worst range). It’s what the company likes to call its “layer cake” approach to 5G, with the 2.5GHz chunk of the cake the “Goldilocks” portion: fast enough to offer a meaningful speed increases over regular LTE and low-band 5G but still able to be transmitted over broad chunks of cities and towns without worrying about interference from trees, walls, or buildings (problems that greatly limit mmWave).