T-Mobile gains cred in smaller markets as ‘the 5G company’

T-Mobile President and CEO Mike Sievert said his company is focused on rural areas not because that’s where it promised to build out 5G, but because “it’s the size of the prize.” Big wireless carriers tend to be pretty low-key in smaller and more rural areas because the economics don’t pencil out – they represent large geographic areas to cover and fewer people to pay for service. Yet T-Mobile made a lot of promises to get its merger with Sprint approved, and one of them was to cover rural areas with 5G. Already, T-Mobile is seeing the most rapid movements in its brand reputation in smaller markets and rural areas these days compared with more populated areas, according to Sievert. Particularly in small markets and rural areas, “we are up 52 percent from just a year ago in terms of the reputation of people saying, ‘Hey, that company is the 5G company.’ And that’s just an example of how our brand is evolving,” he said. Sievert also made a point to bring up T-Mobile’s 5G mid-band deployment compared to rivals AT&T and Verizon. For mid-band, AT&T and Verizon are mostly banking on C-band spectrum that won’t be available until late 2021, and "T-Mobile will have already deployed by the end of this year” in the 2.5 GHz band, Sievert stated.