T-Mobile will start building out its 5G network this year and plans to be in 30 cities by the end of 2018. The first four of those are being announced today: New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Las Vegas. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray boasted that the company’s competitors aren’t starting their 5G deployment in locations anywhere near as dense. “Why are we in New York and not Waco? Because New York matters.”

No one will actually be able to use the 5G network this year, though. Ray said it wouldn’t be until this time next year that we’ll see the first phones announced that support 5G on T-Mobile’s network. “A year from now, we’re very confident,” he said today during a presentation at Mobile World Congress.

It’s not entirely clear what consumers should expect once they get on a 5G network. Speeds should certainly be faster, but T-Mobile (and other carriers) are talking about 5G as an extension of LTE, rather than a replacement for it. “5G is another incremental step, and it will become a much larger one as time moves forward,” Ray said.

T-Mobile plans to use millimeter wave (which is fast but short range) and more traditional LTE-range wireless bands to build its 5G network, offering some combination of enhanced speeds and broad reach. Ray said you’ll see an “incremental benefit” when you’re connected to 5G when it’s running on an LTE-like wireless band. “You’ll see more where you have millimeter wave,” which is likely to be limited to denser cities.

“Are we going to see average speeds move up by tens of megabits per second? For sure,” Ray said. “Will it be consistent next year? It’s too soon to say.”

Today’s announcement is very much meant to upstage T-Mobile’s competitors. AT&T said last week that it will roll out 5G to its first three cities this year: Dallas, Atlanta, and Waco (the subject of Ray’s mockery). Verizon has yet to say where its 5G deployment will start, but it has said it’ll be coming to five cities.

Of course, each carrier has a unique definition of 5G at this point that, no surprise, suits their own network the best, so in all these cases, it’s not entirely clear how much of a difference these initial 5G deployments will make or even how big of an area they’ll cover at first. But at a bare minimum, T-Mobile wants to take the lead on the 5G marketing hype.