As Verizon and AT&T hustle to roll out C-Band throughout the US, something similar—but even faster—is going on north of the border.
The three Canadian carriers just launched their 3.5GHz 5G in June, but we've already been treated to several expansion updates. It's spreading fast. Today, Bell announced that it's turning on 3.5GHz across much of southern Ontario, including the cities of Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, London, Barrie, and Missisauga.
The new 3.5GHz mid-band 5G is a far greater transformation of 5G than Canadians had seen previously. Although the 2020-2021 5G rollouts generally added a small amount of spectrum so the networks could qualify as 5G, this year's rollout in some cases doubles the amount of airwaves carriers are using, for vastly better speeds and capacity.
For those who don't know Canadian geography: southern Ontario is the most densely populated part of the country. The areas Bell is describing—all very close to New York, Ohio, or Michigan—are home to about 11 million people, or 29% of the population of the country.
Bell also pre-announced rollout of a standalone (SA) 5G network in Toronto that's more geared towards businesses. Bell's competitor Telus has also been talking about industrial uses of 5G, tagging "health, agriculture, energy transportation and manufacturing" as key sectors.
We got to drive around Toronto this week and see some of Bell's new performance, which included Speedtest results of up to 1.6Gbps, as well as an engineering-mode demo of the standalone network, which basically just proved it works. That 1.6Gbps result is faster than we've seen on US mid-band networks—T-Mobile's predominantly mid-band network maxed out at 1.3Gbps in our nationwide drive tests earlier this year. Canadian networks also generally had better performance than US networks through the 4G era.
Consumers with Samsung Galaxy S22 series, Pixel 6 series, or iPhone 12 or 13 generation phones should be able to access Bell's network. Unlike in the US, there's no special '5G+' icon in phone status bars. Bell says they're working with phone manufacturers on providing an icon.
You can hunt down the difference by relying on Bell's new coverage map, which the company launched today. The new map shows 3500Mhz coverage for Bell's own network in southern Ontario; it does not yet show coverage in cities like Ottawa, Montreal, and Edmonton where Bell would, in theory, share Telus' radio network.
We'll have a bigger story on our Canadian 5G+ experience next week. Our annual report on Canadian wireless networks from nationwide drive testing comes out in September.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated with details on Bell's new coverage map, which the company unveiled today.