Eric Luebchow: Hi great. Thanks for taking the question. Just to follow up on the fiber-to-the-home strategy at a high level, as you look at potential future opportunities, is the goal to target areas where you might be underpenetrated in either fixed wireless or traditional mobile to kind of expand your addressable market or is it in part to provide an alternative for existing FWA subs to offload to a higher capacity option? Any color there would be helpful. And then secondly, just on the network positioning today, maybe you could talk about how you’re sequencing capital to put additional spectrum to work between C-band, the DoD spectrum, 2.5 GHz refarming AWS, just anything, any color you could provide on how you’re working to maintain your network advantage, particularly as your two large peers have made further progress in building out mid band spectrum. Thank you.
Mike Sievert: Sounds good. Well, let’s start with the second one about network. I mean, I am really pleased with what is happening with the team. We continue to actually extend our lead. If you look nationwide, don’t look at somebody’s favorite denominator, but just look nationwide at all of the customers and all of the experience that all the customers are having, we’re actually pulling ahead and our average speeds are double our competitive benchmarks. And so one of the reasons for this is that it’s not just looking underneath the 5G, but it’s looking at the availability of that 5G that for us, is in so many more places, reaching so many more people. And with that full layer cake, which keeps the customers connected to 5G, all that results in a fantastic experience. Maybe you can give a little color on what’s been unfolding. Talk about auction 108 and how we’re deploying advanced technologies over.
Peter Osvaldik: Well, thank you, Mike. And yes, we’re very excited about the network and how it keeps advancing and you mentioned C-band. So some of our competitors have launched C-band and put it out there. And in the areas where they launched it, we do see that the gap between us and them narrowed a little bit, even though we are still way ahead. But as you said, we also noticed that the overall median downlink speeds. We are gaining another quarter again. And the main reason for us doing that is really the unique way we’ve built and constructed the network. We are the only one in the country who has three completely dedicated bands towards 5G. We have 2.5. We have 1900 now, and we have 600. And that gives us that big advantage together with the standalone network and the larger deployment in the footprint that we have.
In fact, we have now 90% of our sites capable of 5G. We have, traffic wise, about 85% of our traffic on these tri-band sites that are all working with standalone technology and working with carrier.
Eric Luebchow: Can you talk more about that one? So 85% of the time, people are attaching to a site with all three bands of 5G.
Peter Osvaldik: That’s correct.
Eric Luebchow: And how does that affect the quality of the connection and the reliability of the 5G connectivity?
Peter Osvaldik: Well, very much so, because out of that we also have, and this is an even more remarkable stat, we have 93% of the traffic on mid-band, which means that there is no toggling. It just creates a much more consistent experience. There is no toggling between when you’re on LTE and 5G. You’re staying in 5G the entire. No toggling between low band and mid-band, so another factor of no toggling. The other fun is that we have a grid, and this is a unique thing for T-Mobile. We have a grid that is based from the beginning on a mid-band experience. So when we deploy 2.5, we get a very consistent experience between our towers, as opposed to some of our competitors who has a low band grid and therefore, and a higher band on the C-band. C-band is higher than 2.5. That creates a less, more sort of interrupted, not so clear. Clear and consistent experience. That’s what we’re differentiating from.
Mike Sievert: Less somebody experiencing a cell edge condition of 5G, right? Because our grid is tighter and our spectrum reaches further. And the net effect of those two things is you’re on 5G and a high quality 5G link more of the time, and 85% of the time you’re seeing all three bands, where a lot of the time, we use advanced carrier aggregation techniques so that you get the benefit of all those bands in terms of your signal strength. Like the uplink might be in the low band, the downlink might be in the mid band, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all advanced techniques that the rollout with our competitors is quite variable, but we’re really focused on giving everybody a consistent experience.
Peter Osvaldik: That’s very right, Mike and it’s recognized. I mean, we saw in the Ookla measurements another quarter where we came in and the overall network leader, we were also recognized by open signal as having the most reliable experience. So I think those are remarkable facts showing. And then you mentioned also our 108 auction and how quickly we deployed. It took us two weeks to get it all lit up. In our entire network, over a population of about 60 million, we were able to shoot up our 5G median link speeds by about 20% or a little bit more even. So, really a good result and very quickly and shows that we can deploy spectrum very fast.
Mike Sievert: Well, thank you all for joining our fireside chat about network. But I did want to make sure, because there is this kind of misnomer out there that everybody’s catching up and the party is over. And I’ve been saying this for years, we remain two years ahead of the party on 5G, and our customers are having a radically differentiated experience. And you can see it in the data, not just in the rhetoric. So I’m really glad you asked about that. Now, there was another question, though, about fiber and where we intend to target. Look, I can’t help you much on that because we don’t have. We’re not rolling out a plan that this is the beginning of a big wave of initiatives here. We’re really happy about this initiative and how it augments 5G broadband, and we intend to go put our energy into it.
But look, I do want to remind people that this isn’t a regional thing for 5G home Internet. It’s really a sector by sector assessment, neighborhood by neighborhood, as to where will we have excess capacity, because that sector gets hung in order to give the kind of competitive experience that we were just coffee talking about. But then if mobile usage isn’t predicted to soak up all that capacity, then individual households get approved for home broadband. And so now if those neighborhoods are neighborhoods where we roll out fiber, then we can actually have some of those neighbors be added to the 5G, who wouldn’t otherwise be added. That’s TAM expanding potentially, but we’re really focused on these things right now. Very happy to have this initiative out the door and nothing further to report about it.
Eric Luebchow: All right, thank you, gentlemen.
Mike Sievert: Okay. You bet.
Jud Henry: That was great. I’m sorry I didn’t bring my popcorn for that one. All right, let’s go to the next question.
Operator: And the next question is from Sam McHugh with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Sam McHugh: Yeah. Afternoon, guys. Thanks for the questions, just two, on fiber to begin with, on the existing wholesale agreements you had, can you give us any color on what kind of penetration levels you’re seeing? Kind of year one, year two, so we can think about the potential in the new JV. And then secondly, I think on FWA, I’ve seen some reports suggesting you might start sending notifications to people who moved the products from the home address. Do you think that’ll have any impact on the kind of net ads going forward? And I guess more broadly, how should we think about that cadence of FWA through the rest of this year? Thank you very much.
Mike Sievert: Thank you. And we’ll go to Mike for both questions.
Michael Katz: Yes, so first on the, on the fiber question, remember, a lot of these wholesale markets that we’ve launched are brand new and haven’t even been existing for a year. But when you heard Mike talking about the assets that T-Mobile has and how we think that those give us advantage relative to other investors, that is exactly what we’re starting to see play out in these wholesale markets. Remember, at small scale, we’re in parts of about 16 markets spread around the country, but what we’re seeing is a pace that would get us over 20% in the first year inside those markets. So we’re really pleased with the penetration that we’re seeing there. Now, on your FWA question, and specifically earlier this week, we launched a couple of new products, and let me just give a little bit of context to those.
Mike talked about us moving over 5 million customers in our home broadband business this quarter, which obviously is a huge milestone for us. And we now sit at the center of millions of homes with the most important technology in their house. And we think that gives us an opportunity, and I think I’ve mentioned this in the last couple of calls, to look at opportunities to expand into other products and services inside the home, as well as give us tons of insight from what we’re hearing from customers of additional needs. So earlier this week, we launched a program called Whole Home, which gives customers the ability to, in addition to the CPE and router that we provide in our regular HSI package, they can expand that and add mesh that integrates into our CPE so they can give themselves a much larger Wi-Fi footprint inside their home.
We also include some additional support for all the peripheral devices that attach to your network. So if you’ve got a laptop or a printer that you need support on, we’ll offer that as part of this program. And then secondly, we offered a new program called Away. And I’m really excited about this one because one of the things we’ve heard from customers is because this is a product that only requires power. You know, we’re not running a wire into your house or anything like that. It just requires power. And we see customers that want to use this on their boat or in their RV or while they’re camping. And we created a couple of new plans specifically for those use cases that allow customers to move this as their life, move along in their RV. The other thing I’m really excited about in combination with that is we struck a partnership with Camping World.
And camping world, if you’re not familiar with them, is the largest camping and RV retailer in the country and they’re going to be partnering with us on these Away programs to sell to their customers and to integrate our HSI routers inside RVs that they sell.
Mike Sievert: And you can send your orders for our new Away product to Mike Katz. Hey, by the way, you asked one last question, which is about what we’re seeing with the wholesale fiber penetration rates. It’s all very early because remember, these are greenfield projects and so our partners were starting out after the wholesale partnerships were struck, but so far so good at a small scale. We’re seeing year one penetration rates trending to 20%. That’s above industry benchmarks. That’s a good sign on your way to terminal penetration rates that are much higher than that. So everything we’re seeing from these small scale, so far anyway, it’s going to grow. But so far, small scale pilots in the wholesale range was very positive and that’s adding, of course, to our confidence to do news like today. So hopefully that covers your questions.
Sam McHugh: Awesome. Just the cadence on FWA?
Mike Sievert: Cadence, tell me one more time what that part’s about?
Sam McHugh: And then in terms of the kind of net add development through the rest of the year, we’ve obviously seen some moves from T and others kind of how we should think about growth going forward?
