Las Vegas among first getting T-Mobile 5G smartphone service

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

T-Mobile CEO John Legere speaks at a T-Mobile announcement in San Francisco, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2014. T-Mobile will sell more than 100 smartphone models with a built-in feature that taps into Wi-Fi networks to make phone calls and send texts when customers can’t connect to the wireless carrier’s cellular network.

Las Vegas will be one of the first cities in the U.S. to get T-Mobile’s 5G smartphone service, the company announced today.

Las Vegas joins New York, Los Angeles and Dallas as the first of 30 cities that will be connected with the enhanced smartphone data service in early 2019 when 5G smartphones launch, T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

T-Mobile will spend much of 2018 building out its 5G network in the 30 selected cities ahead of next year’s unveiling.

“At T-Mobile, our vision of a 5G future keeps the customer front and center, just like the way we built the nation’s fastest LTE network,” Ray said. “When we built our LTE network, we had the unlimited future in mind, and we take that same approach here. Every dollar we invest in our network is a 5G dollar.”

As it stands, phones must choose between 2G, 3G, or 4G LTE. The first 5G smartphones will use both 5G and LTE simultaneously, offering faster data speeds that will benefit Internet of things use, which is used heavily by smart city technology, like what’s being tested in the Innovation District in downtown Las Vegas.

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