Verizon today is making its 5G network available in Chicago and Minneapolis with the Moto Z3 phone, the world's first commercially available 5G smartphone.
"Verizon customers will be the first in the world to have the power of 5G in their hands," said Verizon CEO and Chairman Hans Vestberg.
The Moto Z3, a midrange phone, costs $480 and its 5G Moto Mod "backpack" will set you back $199.99, Verizon said. To use 5G, customers will need to be on an unlimited data plan and pay a $10 supplement, although the first three months will be free.
The Z3 will be followed by the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, which Verizon has said will launch in late spring. Verizon has also promised an Inseego hotspot for its network, although we don't have pricing or release dates for that one.
Verizon's launch was earlier scheduled for April 11, so why push it up? I think it was to beat the Koreans. The three South Korean carriers all announced their 5G service plans today, and they're putting the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G on sale Friday.
Firsts matter; if you do something first you can put it on billboards forever. So by offering the world's first 5G smartphone, Verizon gains some bragging rights.
Those bragging rights can get complicated. AT&T launched a mobile 5G network last December, but only with a invitation-only hotspot. Verizon launched a 5G home internet system in October.
Coverage Limited to Start
Initially, Verizon's 5G coverage will be very limited. We put together some coverage maps recently based on Verizon's list of neighborhood names. The carrier is using short-range, but high-speed 28GHz spectrum for its initial 5G network, which means it needs a dense grid of cell sites to build coverage. The network is also unlikely to have much indoor coverage.
Downtown Chicago is a perfect site for both Verizon and AT&T to set up initial 5G networks, because they already have that dense grid; it was built for LAA, a short-range 4G booster technology I tested last year.
There are some hints in Verizon's press release that the carrier is still struggling with early base-station firmware that has bedeviled AT&T for the past few months. Last week, AT&T said a recent update pushed its equipment from single-carrier to four-carrier aggregation, allowing speeds of up to 1Gbps, and they suggested their network is now ready for broader adoption.
"Early customers in Chicago and Minneapolis should expect typical download speeds of 450Mbps, with peak speeds of nearly 1Gbps, and latency less than 30 milliseconds," Verizon notes. "5G is a new and rapidly evolving technology and Verizon expects regular improvement in 5G Ultra Wideband speed, latency and overall network performance as Verizon engineers, working with a number of technology partners, continue to upgrade the network."
If Verizon can really deliver typical speeds of 450Mbps, that's 13 times what Ookla Speedtest Intelligence is reporting as Verizon's current average LTE speeds, at 33Mbps. That would be a huge jump.
We'll bring you professionally tested results for Verizon's 5G network soon.