T-Mobile CTO Questions How Big a Role High-Band Will Play in 5G for Most Consumers

T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray questioned how big a role millimeter-wave spectrum, as being deployed by Verizon and AT&T, will play in 5G. In a video Ray posted Monday, as someone from T-Mobile slides close a glass door, the high-band signal drops completely. Millimeter wave “has great potential in terms of speed and capacity, but it doesn’t travel far from the cell site and doesn’t penetrate materials at all,” he blogged. “It will never materially scale beyond small pockets of 5G hotspots in dense urban environments.” Ray also said Verizon’s first 5G markets suffer from more than propagation shortcomings. Customers pay an extra $10 a month and “coverage is very spotty and unreliable,” he said: “Verizon won’t publish a coverage map or acknowledge how limited their strategy really is, but people quickly found that Verizon’s 5G was awfully hard to find, barely available at the places it was promised to be available, dropping repeatedly to 4G and disappeared if they stepped into a building.” Verizon and AT&T didn't comment.