T-Mobile Ready to Shutter CDMA Network, CFO Says

T-Mobile is “absolutely on track” to shutter its 3G network starting March 31, Chief Financial Officer Peter Osvaldik said at a Deutsche Bank investment conference Tuesday. Osvaldik said AT&T and Verizon won’t be able to catch up soon with T-Mobile’s 5G deployment. “We're the only ones with a 5G stand-alone core, and you really need a 5G stand-alone core to enable a lot of these use cases that you're hearing about -- network slicing, creating private networks, things like that,” he said: That's why business customers “are tremendously excited to work with us because they know we have the network capabilities before you even talk about the actual coverage differentiation that we have on the mid-band layer and the low-band layer of the network,” he said. 5G won’t be built based on millimeter wave spectrum or small cells, he said: “That's not a way you can generate ubiquitous coverage. The way we approached it is a macro-tower-focused network.” T-Mobile had to deploy 5G on three times as many towers to get from 100 million covered POPs to 200 million, he said. That's what other carriers “have ahead of them to get from 100 million to 200 million, and it's going to take them a while to get to 200 million,” he said.