When talking about its 5G coverage, T-Mobile regularly refers to the coverage as a "layer cake" because it includes low-band, mid-band, and high-band spectrum. This week, T-Mo took that "layer cake" metaphor and made it reality.
T-Mobile and Betty Crocker today unveiled a "Supercharged 5G Layer Cake" mix. This boxed cake mix includes the ingredients to help you make a magenta-colored layer cake of your own plus instructions on how to do it.
T-Mo gave away a limited number of Betty Crocker 5G Layer Cake mixes to anyone who wanted them today, and it ended up selling out in minutes. You're not completely out of luck if you missed out, because T-Mobile says that it'll be giving some mixes away on Twitter, so you should follow the @TMobile and @NevilleRay accounts to watch for them.
The 5G network "layer cake" that T-Mobile often touts includes a low-band 600MHz base that isn't the fastest of the three layers but has the farthest reach. In the middle is mid-band 2.5GHz that offers a mix of speed and coverage, and up top is high-band mmWave that isn't great at covering long distances or penetrating buildings but does offer super-fast speeds.
T-Mobile announced late last year that its 5G network had achieved nationwide coverage thanks to low-band spectrum. Since then, T-Mo has been deploying mid-band 2.5GHz 5G that it got from the Sprint merger to help boost speeds, and it recently rolled out those mid-band airwaves in 121 new cities. T-Mobile expects its mid-band 5G to be available in thousands of additional cities before the end of the year.