5G Advanced is coming to T-Mobile and this is what that means for you

Today, all Android flagships come with 5G support, and carriers have ramped up their networks to give customers the 5G advantage, especially in busy urban areas. If 5G didn’t meet your network speed needs, we’re already staring at a new network upgrade in the form of 5G-Advanced. The good news is that T-Mobile plans to bring 5G Advanced to its network before the end of this year.

T-Mobile’s President of Technology, Ulf Ewaldsson, said this Fiery network that T-Mobile plans to deliver its 5G-Advanced based service by the end of 2024. The service will provide features such as improved spectral efficiency and advanced positioning.

T-Mobile is said to be leading the way with its 5G-Advanced plans as it has deployed a nationwide 5G standalone (5G SA) network instead of running a 5G RAN on a 4G LTE core, bringing 5G-Advanced to can roll out its network as a software update. The report notes that AT&T began deploying 5G on its own in late 2022, and Verizon has now launched standalone in several US states, but neither carrier has a nationwide 5G SA footprint yet.

5G-Advanced, also known as 5.5G and formally defined in 3GPP Release 18, is an upgrade of existing 5G networks. It promises faster speeds, improvements to Massive MIMO, high-precision sensing, and energy efficiency by allowing devices to enter a low-power state when not in use.

Once the network comes online, smartphone OEMs and chip makers will start heavily promoting the 5G Advance capabilities on their smartphones. Not only must the modem support 5G-Advanced (most recent releases from Qualcomm, such as the Snapdragon X75, X72, and -Advanced.

The OPPO Find X7 series in China supports 5G-Advanced (5.5G) on China Mobile. We couldn’t find any reliable information about smartphones that already support this network in the US. We could probably see a new wave of 5G-Advanced-ready smartphones once the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 possibly launches with the Snapdragon X80 modem. So if you’re hoping to enjoy 5.5G, you might need a new smartphone.