LG Electronics North America CEO William Cho said the tech company's nearly 20-year partnership with Sprint would expand, with Sprint's 5G experts to partner with LG in the design of the phone.

"Today's announcement brings us one step closer to putting a beautifully designed advanced 5G smartphone in our customers' hands".

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray told ZDNet that the carrier's 5G deployment across 30 cities this year -- Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Dallas are to have the service by 2019 -- is "moving well", with the 600MHz LTE rollout beginning last year and much of the hardware being 5G NR capable.

In making T-Mobile's 5G announcement, Ray had said LTE-Advanced upgrades would form the basis for the network, with T-Mobile planning to build its 5G offering using both 600MHz and mmWave spectrum, as well as deploying 25,000 small cells for LAA-LTE.

According to Sprint, it spent the quarter to June adding thousands of outdoor small cells, with 15,000 now installed; distributing more than 65,000 of its Magic Boxes for over 260,000 across the nation; and deploying 2.5GHz spectrum on almost two thirds of its macro sites.

Its deployment of Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (Massive MIMO) radios ahead of the launch of 5G is under way, with Sprint saying it "continues to expect to launch the first mobile 5G network in the US in the first half of 2019".

Sprint additionally said it plans to utilise artificial intelligence across its customer service offerings.