T-Mobile blankets all New Yorkers with fast 5G so the city’s Link5G towers were ‘pointless’

Build it and they won’t come

“CityBridge’s mission is to provide NYC residents and visitors with free and equitable access to connectivity, information, and wireless services across the 5 boroughs,” adds the company in its mission statement. 

Link5G tower commissioned in Brooklyn | Image credit – LinkNYC

Granted, the Link5G towers are still a more elegant solution than similar undertakings in other cities, yet most of them now sit empty and largely devoid of carrier 5G equipment, with only 2 of 200 having any installed. That’s 1% penetration rate of the main purpose for their existence.

They are also supposed to bring income to the city in exchange for the permits by sharing a percentage of the advertising and other revenue received by their franchisee, such as rents for carrier 5G equipment. The agreement was so far from reaching the CityBridge consortium’s lofty revenue goals, however, that before the Link5G tower deployments the annual due amount was revised down to the $3 million it can meet with actually renting out tower space to carriers.

Henning Schulzrinne, July ’24

T-Mobile begs to differ on 5G in NYC communities

Granted, this is the whole network reach that includes the 5G Extended Range coverage on the low-band 600MHz spectrum that T-Mobile started deploying even before its merger with Sprint brought it the mid-bands that have formed the basis of its award-winning 5G efforts.

– FCC March 14  ’24

When the City of New York commissioned the Link5G towers two years ago in the aftermath of the pandemic’s remote learning connectivity conundrum, however, the broadband Internet definition was much more lenient, so even T-Mobile‘s Extended Range 5G would’ve covered the FCC’s requirements by a large margin.

T-Mobile’s 5G network speeds at the time meet and exceed the federal 25 Mbps broadband threshold several times | Image credit – T-Mobile via Ookla

This is the overall 5G coverage speeds across the nation, but even for New York City, in particular, it was precisely T-Mobile that was awarded the fastest network provider with median 117.61 download and 13.71 upload speeds then, too.

Long story short, it seems that there hasn’t been much practical use for the Link5G towers that the City of New York commissioned with the explicit purpose to level the playing field in low-income neighborhoods in terms of broadband Internet connectivity, at least not where T-Mobile is concerned. Carriers have had cheaper and thus more preferred options to install their equipment on commercial or residential rooftops, billboards, placed higher than with the Link5G towers that on top of that stick like a sore thumb in residential communities. 

Granted, some residents have come to appreciate the free Wi-Fi, city services’ tablet access, or charging outlets the Link5G towers provide, but the actual 5G part of the equation is seemingly not going to be realized any time soon.