More cities are receiving millimeter-wave 5G. However quickly, citywide coverage evades the company.
Verizon now hit the 60-city landmark is guaranteed for this season with the inclusion of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Albuquerque, and Durham, NC to its”ultra wideband” millimeter-wave 5G network.
Additionally, it said it included Central Texas, Tulsa, upstate New York, and New England to its”nationally” 5G system. Even though in our testing, that community has mostly delivered an icon shift instead of new rates or capacities.
The company today asserts 61 cities as part of its UWB system. Still, in my mind, it is extending that definition by phoning Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Raleigh and Durham, and Tampa and St. Petersburg in different cities. (They are usually considered elements of the same metro area.)
Quick or Accessible? Pick One
Verizon’s 5G challenge is now that it’s a fast network that is not too accessible and an available network identical to 4G.
Its UWB platform could get 2Gbps and over; this technology made it our Fastest Mobile Network for 2020. However, UWB works a couple of hundred feet from every panel and mostly outdoors in our testing. That’s made it rather tricky to blanket cities dense pieces of towns with that kind of 5G. Verizon has been enlarging its coverage month but must block by block. Its policy in NYC, to this very day, is minimal and intermittent, even though it was established in September 2019.
Verizon is working together with businesses that make repeaters, for example, Pivotal Commware, to expand the reach of UWB, but these gadgets have not attained consumers yet.
Its”nationally” 5G is based on dynamic range sharing, a kind of 5G that uses 5G encoding to fresh odds and ends of present 4G channels. As it is not using any broader stations than 4G, it is hard to find any performance gap from 4G. We will perform more testing on Verizon DSS after this winter.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a year off. The FCC is now auctioning much mid-band airwaves called the C-Band, which Verizon is bidding for and can cover cities with quick 5G relatively readily. Bidding is presently around $15 billion and will finish sometime next year.
The very first C-Band networks might not appear before the end of 2021. However, significance Verizon will fight along for one more year with what it is got.
