HAWAII—Verizon wants you to take 5G to Disneyland. As the No. 1 carrier expands its millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G network to 30 cities by the end of the year, it's eyeing Disney theme parks for potential expansion, Verizon chief product development officer Nicki Palmer said.
When I asked her specifically, "are you putting millimeter-wave in the Disney parks?" she said, "We haven't talked about it … I want to, and as soon as we can, we will. That's part of the experience. We're a partner in Disney StudioLab … there is some crazy exciting stuff happening there," she said.
Verizon's mmWave network is the fastest in the land, but it's also the most difficult to build as the cell sites only have about an 800-foot radius right now. Here at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, I'm getting 2Gbps down on the Grand Wailea hotel resort property, but not in the rest of the area.
Verizon does have plans to launch a broader-area 5G network using a spectrum-sharing technology called DSS, which Qualcomm showed off on stage here. But that will come later in 2020; until then, Palmer said she's confident Verizon's 4G can compete with low-band 5G systems like the one T-Mobile just launched and the one AT&T has announced is coming soon.
"There's always room to improve 4G. There's LTE-Advanced features that we continue to put on the network … Our 4G network beats others' 5G networks in side-to-side comparisons because we've continued to improve that network," she said. "That continues to happen, like, all around the country."
For now, Verizon is devoting its new mid-band CBRS spectrum to additional 4G capacity rather than turning it into a form of 5G, although the company could shift it over later.
"As we're deploying 5G we're improving 4G," she said. "This is not a 5G or nothing game."
What mmWave Is For
That said, Palmer maintained that Verizon will have 5G in 30 cities by the end of the year, and will continue to build out in even more cities in 2020. Verizon's 5G network has been slowly extending over parts of its currently covered cities, its online 5G maps show.
Some of the kinds of high-end multimedia features Qualcomm demonstrated here in Hawaii, such as 8K video, are going to require the huge bandwidth mmWave provides. In the demo room here at Qualcomm, Verizon was showing off cloud-based video editing.
"I think about user-generated content. I think about augmented experiences. Not total VR experiences, but augmented experiences. I think they will start to be more prevalent in 2020," Palmer said.
Otherwise, it was a little tough getting clear answers out of Palmer on some topics Verizon customers really want to know about. Take 5G home internet, for instance. Verizon says it's coming, and Palmer acknowledges that customers really want it. But exactly when is it expanding to more of Verizon's upcoming 30 5G cities? She wouldn't say, other than to say she's "bullish."
"We remain bullish and that feeling comes from our existing customers … we're going to build it as fast as we can," she said.