T-Mobile is upgrading a service that most of you can’t access. On Thursday, the carrier signed a deal with New York City to put its first responders on T-Priority, the fast-lane service for public safety agencies that T-Mobile introduced in September.
“It’s the ultimate priority on the ultimate network,” said Callie Field, president of T-Mobile Business Group, at a live-streamed event in NYC.
“Seconds matter, and connectivity matters,” added NYC chief technology officer Matthew Fraser.
T-Priority uses a 5G feature called network slicing. First deployed in August 2023, it gives the devices and communications of police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders faster connections and higher priority than those of other users on T-Mobile’s network.
“The slice helps us deliver faster speeds even more consistently,” Field said, including the ability to reassign most of the carrier’s capacity to T-Priority in an emergency.
She compared that to the 4G footing of FirstNet, the government-backed public-safety network that AT&T operates, saying FirstNet’s LTE Band 14 offers a tenth of T-Priority’s capacity.
After this post was published AT&T sent a comment from FirstNet president Scott Agnew upholding that 4G and 5G network as “built exclusively for public safety” and “not a commercial offering–or even a slice of one” while taking offense to T-Mobile’s comparison.
“Instead of working alongside America’s first responders to give them the network they asked for and deserve, they are using public safety as a marketing gimmick without much to offer in return,” the statement read. “No connection is more important than one that can help save a life, and as public safety’s partner, FirstNet is in a league of its own.”
In a network crunch, unprioritized traffic can wind up not getting delivered at all–with results like the San Francisco traffic jams caused by Cruise’s self-driving taxis after a network overload left those autonomous vehicles offline.
(FirstNet itself began as a response to first responders to the 9/11 terrorist attacks struggling to communicate between devices on incompatible networks while public wireless and wired networks crumpled under extreme usage conditions.)
T-Mobile was able to give T-Priority its own network slice in 2020, fulfilling one of 5G’s early promises, because it first launched standalone 5G–meaning its 5G transmitters can directly open a connection with a device instead of using 4G to set that up. AT&T and Verizon have since begun rolling out standalone 5G and network slicing; for example, last February, AT&T announced plans to deploy standalone 5G for FirstNet.
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Later this year, T-Mobile will include free T-Mobile Starlink roaming on agencies’ T-Priority plans. That in-testing service that T-Mobile and SpaceX announced in 2022 will be $15 extra on all but T-Mobile’s most expensive consumer plans.
T-Mobile also revealed a new set of device partners for T-Priority, including Samsung, which will ship ruggedized devices for the network, and Skydio, which will equip its public-safety drones for T-Priority.
Finally, individual first responders such as volunteer firefighters will get free access to that T-Priority network slice on their personal devices. That option, usually $7.50 a month, requires the carrier’s Go5G First Responder discounted plans, which itself require annual verification of eligibility, and requires staying on eligible plans. Subscribers to other T-Mobile first-responder discounts, such as an upcoming Essentials plan, will be able to add that separately at the usual $7.50 rate.
Editors’ note: We updated this post with comments from AT&T and additional details from T-Mobile.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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