- T-Mobile used the Las Vegas Grand Prix as a major 5G showcase, deploying seven network slices
- Engineers cut deployment time in half and leaned heavily on wireless-only setups
- Despite lingering perception problems, T-Mobile is betting that network performance wins customers
T-Mobile spent a lot of money bringing a bunch of influencers, analysts and journalists to hang out with them and in some cases, see T-Mobile’s cool tech at the Las Vegas Grand Prix (LVGP) this past weekend. (I doubt Paris Hilton was there to check out the latest cell on wheels (COW) at the T-Mobile Zone at Sphere, but who knows?)
The motivator? While T-Mobile has been adding consumer net additions like nobody’s business, its market share among business/enterprise customers was next to nil – until 5G. The extravagant show at the LVGP gave T-Mobile a huge stage on which to demonstrate how its 5G network is not only capable of serving throngs of Formula 1 race fans but the LVGP itself.
It’s paying off. T-Mobile announced last week that it’s signed up for another three years as the “Exclusive 5G Partner” of the Formula 1 Heineken LVGP, extending its previous 3-year deal. It’s also expanding to be the regional 5G “Innovation Partner” of Formula 1, with the next stop being the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, starting in 2026.
The terrain in Austin is significantly different than Las Vegas — smack dab in the middle of farm country as opposed to the dense city and bright lights of the Vegas Strip. But T-Mobile’s engineers learn from each event they do, explained Scott Jacka, senior director of Technology Development Strategy at T-Mobile, during a media briefing.
Applying those learnings, T-Mobile engineers were able to reduce the time it takes to deploy their radios for the Las Vegas Grand Prix from about 60 days in 2023 to just 30 days this year, according to Jacka.
T-Mobile deployed a total of seven network slices – the most T-Mobile has rolled out at any event thus far — to power ticket scanners, broadcast cameras, public safety, about 1,000 point-of-sale terminals and more for the LVGP.
Sure, they brought temporary assets like cells on wheels (COWs) — the types of gear we see at every event like this — but T-Mobile executives stressed that this wasn’t some show-and-tell science fair experiment.
Underlying everything is the real deal — the same network that first responders use in New York City. “These are the real products customers can enjoy,” Andre Almeida, president of the Growth and Emerging Businesses division at T-Mobile, told Fierce. “There is no safety network here. This is T-Mobile’s network at scale.”
To underscore that point, T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw said his phone would be ringing off the hook if one of these network slices went down. (As far as this reporter could tell, his phone was quiet.)
T-Mobile cuts wires
T-Mobile was in Las Vegas to solve two big pain points for the LVGP, he said. One was the fact that when 300,000 fans descend on a small area, you’re going to get congestion. Besides the routine COWs and small sites, T-Mobile beefed up its permanent macro sites to cover the 3.8-mile track.
The other pain point involves areas traditionally served by wires and cables.
“We told LVGP, let’s cut the cables,” Saw said. “We’ll just run everything on 5G. It’s all done over 5G to make sure that we protect the business-critical operations from the throngs of public traffic. We do a slice.”
That wasn’t all. The Grand Prix organizers wanted cameras on top of the Mandalay Bay Hotel to capture the race and because it was impossible to run fiber cable to the top of the roof, they used 5G.
In that situation, “just to make sure that we have the right connection, we actually bonded the 5G channel with our Starlink channel from our friends from SpaceX,” Saw said.
Similar “wireless only” thinking applied to the Bellagio, where a drone was staged to capture the action. “By removing cables and wires, you give the organizers flexibility and convenience,” Saw said.
Analyst: T-Mobile provides showcase
Analysts came away impressed.
“T-Mobile’s deployment at the Las Vegas Grand Prix showcases their comprehensive approach to applied 5G technology, demonstrating how modern networks can address complex, real-world challenges at scale,” said Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink.
He noted that each of the seven network slices was optimized for a specific use case ranging from broadcast-quality video production for drone and sports photography to point-of-sale operations — while simultaneously running private wireless networks with flexible edge breakout capabilities that enabled F1 to process video and data streams locally rather than routing everything through remote data centers.
As for spectrum, T-Mobile acquired a boatload of 2.5 GHz spectrum when it bought Sprint, which provides the mid-band layer for its nationwide 5G network, with 600 MHz low-band spectrum serving as the 5G foundation. In addition, T-Mobile used millimeter wave and C-band to deliver high-capacity connectivity across grandstands and track areas.
Switching tracks: consumers
Circling back to T-Mobile’s consumer segment, T-Mobile is heavily promoting its 5G network prowess, much to the chagrin of its rivals Verizon and AT&T. It shoved the knife in deeper with the release of its “15 minutes to switching” that allows customers to leave Verizon or AT&T and hop onto T-Mobile via the T-Life app.
But T-Mobile execs also know they’ve got a perception problem. Reinforced by years of poor network coverage, T-Mobile is perceived as being the worst network by a lot of people despite the awards it is winning in the 5G era. That’s a big part of the new ads featuring actor Billy Bob Thornton who talks about how T-Mobile’s network was bad for many years but now it’s “the best.”
Big bucks vs. word of mouth
It’s unknown how much T-Mobile spent on the extravaganza that is the Las Vegas Grand Prix and all the assorted advertising, marketing and network upgrades that go into something of this magnitude. Maybe it doesn’t matter – because the most important investment T-Mobile could ever make, IMHO, is in its nationwide network.
I was reminded of this while returning home on my Southwest flight back to Portland, Oregon, on Sunday. My next-door seatmate and her husband were returning home after a whirlwind cross-country two-week vacation.
I told her what I had been doing in Las Vegas and how the trip was sponsored by T-Mobile. I didn’t ask specifically but she offered up that she was a Comcast Xfinity customer until she was offered the chance to try T-Mobile’s Home Internet service for a month. It worked so well that she ditched Xfinity and signed up for T-Mobile’s service, so that now she and her husband’s mobile phones and fixed internet are all bundled through T-Mobile — including an access point for their home and another for their RV.
Contrast that with the guy who had recently moved from Southern California and was among those directing traffic outside the T-Mobile Zone at Sphere on Friday night. He did not have a great experience with T-Mobile, saying its network was crap. Importantly, though, he didn’t say he was getting ready to switch to another carrier just yet.
It just goes to show that you win some and you lose some. Lucky for T-Mobile, it’s winning more than its losing — but that’s never something to take for granted.
Full disclosure: T-Mobile paid for my travel and accommodations for this trip.