I think 2021 is going to be an interesting year for 5G. T-Mobile has announced that they'll have almost a third of the US population covered with 2.5GHz 5G by the end of this year and that they're expecting average speeds of 300Mbps. That's a huge increase from what people are used to with LTE and a lot of people will be accessing that (and a lot more as 2021 rolls on). I think that's where marketing will start getting overcome by word-of-mouth. Verizon can advertise 1Gbps Ultrawide Band, but when people never see it, it'll feel hollow compared to friends getting consistent service in the 300Mbps range with T-Mobile.

I think the key is that it wasn't about LTE vs WiMAX as much as it was about 700MHz vs 2.5GHz. Clearwire's 2.5GHz network would need 13x more cell sites for equivalent coverage which meant rolling out a 4G network was basically impossible. You weren't going to get customers without coverage and you weren't able to build coverage without the customers paying you.

Now, for T-Mobile, the situation is different. They have 600MHz and 700MHz networks providing broad coverage and the 2.5GHz spectrum can give them increased capacity and speed where they need it. T-Mobile talks about it as a layer-cake: low-band to make sure you have coverage everywhere, mid-band to give you better speed and capacity even if it doesn't cover everywhere, and millimeter-wave (Verizon calls it Ultrawide Band and AT&T calls it 5G+) in select areas that need lots of capacity. But it's the low-band coverage that gets enough customers that you can invest in more cell sites to make 2.5GHz work well. And it's the low-band and 1.7/1.9GHz spectrum that makes sure the customer still has a good experience even when they're a bit farther from a cell site or a bit deeper into a building.

Without that base, Clearwire was deploying a network that would just have crap for coverage. And Clearwire was also deploying their network before 4x4 MIMO on phones, before HPUE (high power user equipment), and before massive MIMO network equipment. When they were deploying, the low-band advantage was even bigger.

I think it's situational. Verizon being first to 4G really helped it - they were the first to deploy 4G in what became the dominant way that 4G was deployed with a base layer of low-band supplemented by 1.7/1.9GHz spectrum. T-Mobile is taking that strategy with 5G: get lots of low-band 5G coverage and supplement it with more mid-band spectrum than competitors can come anywhere close to matching. Their customers will end up getting a much faster 5G experience through 2021. Interestingly, Verizon wanted to go the Clearwire route with 5G: deploy 5G at much higher, shorter-range frequencies first. Verizon is backing off that plan and deploying low-band 5G now as I think they've realized that strategy won't work well.

If Verizon kept ignoring low/mid-band 5G and just kept pushing millimeter-wave for the next 5 years, I think customers would care a lot that T-Mobile had nationwide 5G before Verizon. Verizon pivoted and that was key for them. Sprint/Clearwire mostly just kept stumbling. I guess being first matters if it's an actual first rather than a "fake" first. Like, Clearwire launched 4G "first" but didn't really have a plan to continue expanding given their limited revenues and backward agreement with Sprint combined with a lack of spectrum to cover suburbs and such. Verizon launched "first" in that they launched in a way that they could create a nationwide network that gave people consistently good 4G service and that paid off hugely for them.

I think T-Mobile is trying to use that strategy with 5G. Verizon got lots of low-band 4G coverage and then bought more AWS spectrum and got great capacity and speed for users with mid-band. T-Mobile is doing that for 5G.