Verizon expanded its high-speed, short-range millimeter-wave 5G service to 55 cities and launched a "nationwide" 5G system using 4G channels today, in tandem with the launch of the new iPhone 12 line. All four of the new iPhones have all forms of 5G used in the US.
"You can be assured there's no faster 5G on Earth," Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said at the iPhone launch. In our tests, Verizon's UWB 5G system—also known as high-band or nationwide 5G—has shown spectacular speeds of sometimes over 2Gbps, but with very little coverage. Because of its short range, Verizon's UWB 5G only showed 4 percent availability in our 26-city test earlier this summer.
Verizon's "nationwide" 5G will have the opposite problem. By sharing existing 4G channels with 4G devices, "dynamic spectrum sharing" or DSS will give you 5G technology at 4G speeds. We briefly tested it in Chicago over the weekend and saw speeds slightly slower than on 4G alone.
Adam Koeppe, Verizon's SVP of network planning and development, focused on the speed and performance of UWB when I spoke to him. Coverage has expanded over the past few months, he said.
"Every single market that we've deployed has had a material increased in the number of nodes that are providing 5G UWB service," he said.
These Are the Fast Cities
The additional cities are featured on a new integrated coverage map, and coverage is far more extensive than in some of the original launch cities. In Philadelphia, for instance, the network covers most of Central City. Coverage still isn't citywide by a long shot, though. Verizon's new 5G really only covers the central business districts in San Francisco, and it hasn't extended to most of the New York City boroughs.
Koeppe said that Verizon is able to launch with a lot more coverage because it has more available equipment than it previously did.
"In 2019, one of the limitations we had in our deployment was the amount of equipment we could get from our infrastructure providers," he said. "We don't have that limitation, [so] we're able to launch significantly more nodes from the start."
Each UWB node still has the same problems we've seen for the past year, though—great speed, but range of only about 800 feet and an inability to easily penetrate buildings and walls. Verizon is doing field work with repeaters and in-building panels to cover "hard-to-get-to areas," Koeppe said, and the first repeaters will start extending coverage later this year. In-building panels will come in early 2021, he said.
Don't Expect Much From Nationwide
The new "nationwide" network covers 200 million people, with Verizon able to turn parts of its 850MHz (band n5), 1700MHz (n66) and 1900MHz (n2) spectrum over to 5G when 4G customers aren't using it.
As there's going to be no additional airwaves in use, you shouldn't expect much better speeds than on 4G. 5G shines when it has big, broad lanes to itself. On the other hand, this lets Verizon manage a transition from 4G to 5G smoothly, and lets it light up a 5G icon on many people's phones for marketing reasons.
You may see some improvement in latency, though, Koeppe noted. "There are latency benefits on the radio access network you get with the 5G NR capable baseband," he said.
C-Band Questions
The big question for future-proofing is whether any of the phones will support the C-band, a swathe of midband spectrum that the FCC will auction off in December. Without C-band, most of Verizon's network is stuck using 4G channels for 5G, which will offer basically 4G performance.
Koeppe told me that the US band being auctioned is termed n77, and the spec sheets for the new iPhones say they support n77. But Koeppe wouldn't confirm that the phone would work. The floating question is whether the FCC will invent some sort of regulatory barrier to existing n77-compatible devices working on the new airwaves. I'm just not sure.