It turns out those 2018 5G launches weren't really launches at all.
On Verizon's earnings call yesterday, CEO Hans Vestberg explained that a lack of standards-compliant 5G hardware means the company won't be able to expand its 5G home service beyond parts of four cities until the second half of 2019. Meanwhile, AT&T claimed to launch 5G in 12 cities a month ago, but has offered no details about coverage and performance.
The holdup involves the carriers having made promises that their equipment manufacturers couldn't fulfill. In Verizon's case, partners Motorola and Samsung are delaying the launch of 5G standards-compatible "CPEs," or home router equipment, so they can get phones out first. In AT&T's case, I've heard that base stations were launched on very early firmware, which isn't delivering the performance and capacity that 5G promises.
We saw the effect of that early firmware both at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in December and at CES in January. At both shows, the carriers put up mobile 5G demo networks, but the networks were restricted to a single 100MHz channel of millimeter-wave spectrum, with no handoff or carrier aggregation, and a very limited number of devices per sector. That resulted in networks with lower peak speeds than current 4G networks.
Verizon still won't post a coverage map for its 5G Home service on its website. AT&T's Netgear 5G hotspots are available by invitation only, and forums at Reddit, Netgear, and AT&T's own site are curiously silent about their performance, even a month after launch. I've begged AT&T to let me test one of the 5G hotspots, but they've declined so far.
There's another underlying drama: the US battle against Huawei. The Wall Street Journal last month recounted a bunch of European carriers' complaints that Ericsson and Nokia were falling behind Huawei when it came to releasing 5G equipment. Because of the effective ban on Huawei in the US, Huawei is designing its equipment more for other markets. But Huawei does have the 5G home equipment Verizon says it can't get from Motorola and Samsung. If other infrastructure makers can't keep up, then the US will fall behind on technology leadership as a whole.
Can We Believe 5G Promises?
The unfortunate effect of all this may be dampening down enthusiasm and increasing confusion when it comes to 5G in 2019.
If the carriers lie enough, nobody will trust that 5G is coming, or what it's going to deliver. Even now, consumers are extremely confused about what 5G is, and they're very suspicious that carriers aren't going to be delivering affordable, useful 5G service plans. Carriers are doing very little to assuage those concerns, instead focusing on big-picture presentations offuture uses.
This may not make a huge difference in the long run—it'll all get sorted out by 2022, for sure—but it'll make things confusing in the short run.
AT&T is already lying in ways that hurt customers. The company decided to rebrand its existing 4G LTE network as "5G E" and update the status lines on phones with a new indicator, which has made people on the AT&T forums appear to think they're getting 5G when none of them are.
Without hard data on 5G rollouts and performance, the Verizon and AT&T launches are looking increasingly like vaporware. As we move into 2019 and hear from the carriers at Mobile World Congress, they need to show us the real thing: where it works, how to buy it and how much it costs. Can they deliver?