Does T-Mobile use C-band 5G?

Customers will see a “5G UW” or “5G UWB” icon when connected to this part of its network. AT&T also activated its C-Band service on the same date, with Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Jacksonville, Orlando, and South Florida covered in the initial rollout.

C-band sits between the two Wi-Fi bands, which are at 2.4GHz and 5GHz . It’s slightly above and very similar to the 2.6GHz band that Clearwire and then Sprint used for 4G starting in 2007, and which T-Mobile currently uses for mid-band 5G.

If you read an article about 5G last month, chances are it mentioned C-band spectrum (and airplanes, and regulators, and frustrated telcos). But C-band is just one type of mid-band spectrum , which itself is just one of three broad buckets of 5G, alongside low band and high band (often called mmWave).

It’s mid-band spectrum, so it’s considered highly valuable for its coverage and speed characteristics. But it doesn’t define 5G . T-Mobile, for example, uses 600 MHz, 2.5 GHz and 39 GHz for 5G, and when the second tranche of C-band becomes available in 2023, it will have an average 40 MHz of C-band at its disposal.