T-Mobile has turned on 5G in and around the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System in Miami, the operator’s first custom 5G installation in a hospital setting.
The deployment used 2.5 GHz spectrum and in-building radios. T-Mobile declined to name which vendor supplied the indoor equipment.
5G connectivity will support both patients and medical staff with capable handsets. With its ‘Ultra Capacity 5G’ T-Mobile touts speeds of 300 Mbps and up to 1 Gbps peak, citing applications for doctors and nurses such as accessing medical charts and imaging results that require a lot of bandwidth.
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Fifty VA healthcare systems already have access to 4G LTE service from T-Mobile, which promised more to come this year. In 2018, the VA tapped T-Mobile to provide 70,000 lines of wireless service to help make telehealth services more accessible.
“T-Mobile has a strategic vision aligned with the VA to deliver the best technology giving veterans every advantage in quality care, both on-site and through telehealth appointments,” said David Bezzant, Vice President T-Mobile for Government, in a statement. “Our partnership with the VA has allowed us to work together to build customized solutions enabling the VA to bring more healthcare services to veterans.”
T-Mobile isn’t the only carrier working with Veterans Affairs. AT&T this month installed a 5G distributed antenna system (DAS) across the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System using sub-6 GHz, with plans for millimeter wave deployments and edge compute technologies later this year.
Verizon has also been busy with the VA. For example, in 2020 it teamed up with Microsoft and Medivis, in partnership with the VA, for a project starting with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System focused on potential clinical applications using a combination of emerging healthcare innovations and 5G.