BARCELONA—T-Mobile has spent the past few years rolling out architectural advances like standalone 5G and network slicing well ahead of competitors, but these upgrades have not been obvious on its customers’ phone screens.
That’s by design, chief network officer Ankur Kapoor said in an interview at MWC last week. The carrier didn’t want to tell customers that they’d need to switch to more expensive plans to enjoy these upgrades. T-Mobile has been willing to retroactively raise rates on older, no-longer-sold plans. But management also decided against trying to brag about these network-level changes with new status-bar icons or other sorts of customer-experience puffery.
Show, Don’t Tell
“For any network slice, it’s not like you would be able to see on your phone that’s something happening,” Kapoor said of the long-awaited 5G option that lets a network operator provide a virtualized service with defined performance attributes.
For example, when T-Mobile detects especially lag-sensitive gaming traffic, it may put a subscriber’s device on a low-latency slice optimized for that use case.
The company has been pulling out another trick from its bag of network upgrades that it calls “5G Advanced” to improve video calls and less twitchy games: Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S), a network technology that reduces jitter in streaming video.
With Apple Watches, meanwhile, T-Mobile optimizes for device battery life instead of speed by using a 5G option called RedCap (short for reduced capacity). There, however, T-Mobile trailed its competitor AT&T, which began using RedCap to connect Apple smartwatches two months before T-Mobile’s December announcement.
The carrier’s only direct marketing of network slices so far has been to non-consumer markets: T-Priority, a slice-based service for first responders that it introduced last February, and SuperMobile, a new high-end business plan that includes a nationwide network slice offering “intelligent connectivity that adapts to your needs in real-time.”
But even then, the network technology powering these plans may not be evident in action: “The first responders don’t look at their phones and know they’re getting a slice,” Kapoor said.
FWA FTW
Kapoor explained that a comparable amount of offstage optimization goes into T-Mobile’s fixed wireless access (FWA) 5G Home service, starting with whether it has what he called the “fallow capacity” to sell service at a given address.
“We say we can serve you as an FW customer if we believe we really can,” he said. “We absolutely say no to some households.”
In some cases, T-Mobile will offer a Lite version with a 100GB monthly data cap, which, for full-time residential use, is generally the equivalent of “no.”
T-Mobile’s coverage model assesses performance in 165-meter hexagons (yes, like in a board game) in rural areas, 27 meters in urban areas. “It’s very granular,” Kapoor said. And effective, he added: “Our network is operating at the best level ever” despite FWA subscriber data usage that can exceed 2TB a month at some households.
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Third-party customer surveys from the likes of JD Power and PCMag’s own Readers’ Choice surveys continue to show T-Mobile’s 5G Home outranking other fixed-wireless services.
A December report from Ookla based on Q3 2025 Speedtest data found median download speeds for T-Mobile comfortably exceeded those on Verizon and AT&T’s FWA services: 209.06Mbps, versus 137.81Mbps and 104.63Mbps. But it also reported a significant drop in T-Mo’s median upload speeds, from 24.03Mbps in Q1 to 15.49Mbps in Q3.
In a February presentation to investors, T-Mobile reported 8.5 million home 5G customers and projected 18 to 19 million total broadband subscribers by 2030, a total that would include 3 to 4 million on the fiber service it began selling last June.
AI as Network Manager
Telcos have been among the earlier and more enthusiastic adopters of AI to manage their networks—not for buzzword-compliance purposes, but because a good machine-learning model’s ability to detect patterns can make it adept at finding and fixing problems.
Kapoor cited an example of AI finding something that didn’t surface in the traditional customer-satisfaction benchmark of Net Promoter Scores, which had shown “a little bit of decline” among T-Mobile subscribers in Sacramento.
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(In our version of NPS, PCMag’s Readers’ Choice survey, T-Mobile placed sixth with an overall-satisfaction score of 8.4 out of 10, the highest score among the three national carriers but below such resellers as the T-Mobile-owned Mint Mobile.)
Other customer-service metrics, like the carrier’s churn rate, did not line up with those slumping NPS scores. “People were not actually dissatisfied with the network in Sacramento,” Kapoor said.
Instead, AI revealed that the problem was lurking about 80 miles northeast in Lake Tahoe, where many of T-Mobile’s customers go for fun, and where an AI analysis of underlying data points revealed that its network needed an upgrade.
Kapoor also noted that T-Mobile now leans on AI for disaster recovery. “We have now implemented what we call our self-resolving, self-optimizing network algorithms,” he said. “You’re automatically able to change the coverage patterns.” For example, to redirect signals from temporarily vacated homes to wherever people have evacuated.
“If we didn’t have the power of AI, we’d be shooting at your home with an antenna,” he said.
Citing such other recent moves to put AI to work on T-Mobile’s network as the company’s new, no-app-needed live language translation via AI, Kapoor offered a just-you-wait prediction: “Lots more that’s going to happen in AI on the network.”
(Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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