Looking back at Verizon's early spectrum strategy, the carrier acquired low-band spectrum, but “very, very thin swaths of spectrum,” and then “kind of cobbled it all together to make it work,” which was quite an engineering challenge, said Verizon EVP and CTO Kyle Malady.
Then the U.S. government made far more spectrum available. For 5G, Verizon started first in the millimeter wave (mmWave) area, which offers “massive, massive bandwidth,” he said at the Citi investor conference today. “But as everybody knows… it doesn’t carry that far,” so a lot of small cells are required.
That worked well in dense urban environments, in places where people congregate – airports, stadiums and the like (though these places were empty early in the Covid-19 pandemic).
Low-band spectrum is great for coverage, but it’s very limited in bandwidth, he added. “So now with the C-band added to our portfolio… it closes the circuit here. So now we have a little bit of best of both worlds,” with coverage and bandwidth to (soon) offer to customers. “It’s a game changer.”
The devices being offered to consumers already support these various spectrum bands, he said. That synchs up with new “unlimited” plans that Verizon is rolling out today for its 5G Ultra Wideband service when it launches later this month. It’s promising speeds up to 10 times faster than what customers already get for the same price.
In addition, Malady said Verizon is working with Amazon’s satellite initiative Kuiper, which “gives us the ability to cover the whole United States and frankly, the world.”
“We paid money for it,” to the tune of about $45.5 billion, “but we think in the long term, this is generational spectrum and from an engineering perspective, we couldn’t be any more excited to finally hit the start button on this thing,” he said.
Verizon customers will get a chance to experience that C-band spectrum later this month, starting January 19, when Verizon finally turns it on after lengthy, contentious negotiations with the federal government over aviation safety concerns.
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Asked about the latest agreement reached between the wireless carriers and aviation, Malady said: “This is the final agreement,” echoing the sentiment Verizon’s Adam Koeppe shared with Fierce yesterday.
“We have access to that spectrum. We have legal rights to that spectrum,” Malady said. In addition, “there’s been an awful lot of rulemaking regarding this band. There was a very transparent process, an inter-agency, transparent process” that is typical when the government decides to put spectrum up for auction.
“Decisions were made. We went and purchased it and at the last minute," some of these issues came up. "We were thinking of launching in December… because of the noise that came up, we decided to give the government 30 days and we worked through it. So we spent a lot of time with the airline industry, the FAA and others trying to understand what the issue was and we offered up mitigation. That’s what you saw in the letters yesterday,” he said.
Basically, “what we think is a reasonable mitigation is just to follow some of the rules that some of the other countries have put in who’ve been using this spectrum for a long time,” he said, calling out France specifically. “We feel this is it,” in terms of the final launch date.
Obviously around airports now, “we won’t have C-band,” he added. That’s part of the mitigation with the airlines. Still, Verizon and fellow C-band acquirer AT&T will have millimeter wave and other spectrum to use around airports, just not C-band. Over time, the expectation is this will get worked out and they’ll be able to turn on C-band in more places.
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According to Malady, the work with the airlines continues, as they figure out exactly how they’re going to roll forward after the two-week period that ends January 19.
The first tranche of C-band spectrum became available late in 2021, which is the spectrum that will be turned on later this month. Another tranche becomes available by the end of 2023, but Verizon has set itself up to take advantage of some of that spectrum if it becomes available sooner than that. “We’re going to continue to build fast,” Malady said.
Fixated on fixed wireless
On the topic of bandwidth, Malady also said that Verizon had been thinking about going head-to-head with fixed broadband providers for a while, going back to at least the early days of 4G. But it – literally – didn’t have the bandwidth to support the kind of usage required to displace what at one time was DSL.
Although he said “it’s an obvious play for a wireless carrier,” Verizon’s low-band spectrum didn’t have the capacity in the RAN to support both mobility use cases and fixed broadband.
“We’ve been thinking about this for years and years and years,” he said. “We just didn’t have the capability to do it. Now we can,” having accrued the spectrum and bandwidth.
He also gave a shout-out to fiber. “At the end of the day, these networks are really going to be fiber networks with radios hanging off ’em. So we’ve been spending an awful lot of time over the years building out our fiber assets and that’s going to be critical going forward. As we bring massive bandwidth to the table, you need the underlying fiber network to make sure you can transport it,” he said.