LAS VEGAS—We know the carriers are building 5G. But why? In a keynote here at CES, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg turned over most of the event to his partners and customers—a drone operator, a doctor, Disney—to explain the applications they're developing for 5G. He also announced a $1 million "challenge" for folks developing new applications.
To some extent, this was Vestberg making lemonade. Many industry watchers were hoping Verizon would announce its 5G mobile launch date or more consumer devices at CES, but apparently the company just isn't ready for that yet. (The state of AT&T's 5G NR launch, which is a somewhat mysterious mess, helps to explain why.) But 5G is the long haul, so Verizon announced absolutely nothing new in this keynote and instead decided to talk about what will come a few years from now.
Vestberg did drop one tiny bit of news, referring to "millimeter wave and other spectrum" for Verizon's 5G network. The company has generally talked about its 5G network being millimeter-wave only in the near future. In a sidebar from the event, Verizon CTO Kyle Malady confirmed that "eventually we'll use 4G spectrum for 5G." But that's not a near-term low-band 5G plan, the way the three other carriers all have plans to do 5G on 4G spectrum this year (T-Mobile on 600MHz, AT&T on either 850MHz or 1900MHz and Sprint on 2.5GHz.)
So What Is Verizon Doing With 5G?
Verizon put up the president of Skyward, a Verizon subsidiary that operates industrial drones, to talk about how legions of remotely operated drones could coordinate with 5G to do things like survey downed power lines after a disaster. 5G will enable "beyond line of sight" drone operation, Skyward's Mariah Scott said, letting businesses put more drones in the air to more efficiently monitor operations.
At Disney, 5G will change "how we deliver our movies to cinemas and how we work with our production studios around the world," Disney Studios CTO Jamie Voris said. Let me unpack that a little: there's a lot of time burned in the movie production process transferring very large files, sometimes so large that they're shipped on hard drives via FedEx rather than being sent through the internet. 5G, with better backhaul, means faster and more responsive moviemaking—taking that high-end sneakernet out of the equation.
Beyond that, Disney is working on "live volumetric performance capture and streaming of our animated characters to cinemas," Voris said, without quite explaining what that means. It sounds exciting, though.
In medicine, 5G will enable doctors to use mixed reality to see inside the bodies of patients as they do their work, said Chris Morley, CEO of Medivis. When you're doing surgery, low latency becomes critically important.
Finally, Vestberg trotted out Clayton Harris, his first 5G Home customer, who showed off a 690Mbps speed test. Verizon is running a pre-standard 5G home service in four cities right now, and Vestberg only promised "more cities this year" rather than anything specific. Phone-wise, Vestberg just reiterated that the company will have two phones coming up: the Moto Z3 and an unnamed Samsung phone, both of which we've aready heard about.
So that's the far future, and the immediate present. But what is Verizon rolling out in 2019? I suspect we'll have to wait for Mobile World Congress, happening next month in Barcelona, to find out.