Verizon is boasting about its progress in a couple of areas that aren’t exactly slam dunks: building out millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum and deploying gear in anticipation of using C-band spectrum.
The first one isn’t so much of a political hot potato in the broad scheme but the operator has come under fire for relying on mmWave for such a large part of its 5G strategy. Capacity is great and speeds are tremendous at 24 GHz and above, but it comes at a price, and Wall Street analysts especially get on Verizon’s case about that.
For example, in a MoffettNathanson report out this week, the analysts had this to say about 5G OpenSignal tests: “Worse, the mmWave deployments that were supposed to be 5G’s killer showcase are so unlikely to be accessed as to be virtually irrelevant. According to OpenSignal’s latest data, mmWave-capable devices connect to Verizon’s mmWave network just 0.5% of the time, and they’re by far the leader of the pack in this area.”
The 3.7 GHz C-band is another story that involves more moving parts. Verizon is moving full steam ahead on its C-band deployment, for which it spent more than $45 billion at auction, and the spectrum is great for capacity and coverage. Verizon’s expansion initially is focused on macro cell towers, where it can leverage its LTE network infrastructure.
But the aviation community is throwing a really big wrench at the actual use of that spectrum. Verizon and AT&T both agreed to postpone their C-band launches by a month, to January 5, 2022, and they’ve agreed to lower power around airports and helipads for six months to give aviation more time. However, just this week, aviation groups pushed back, saying their concessions aren’t enough, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) teed up new warnings to pilots.
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All of this as Verizon prepares to use these spectrum bands to compete against AT&T and T-Mobile, the latter of which has been one of the biggest badgers of Verizon’s mmWave strategy and one of the reasons it’s so critical to deploy C-band. Thanks to Sprint, T-Mobile has a head start on mid-band 5G with its 2.5 GHz spectrum, and AT&T and Verizon, for the most part, are just embarking on their mid-band layers in a big way with C-band.
Verizon said it expects to cover 100 million additional customers with C-band before the end of March 2022.
Moving ahead
With its 5G Ultra Wideband, which includes mmWave, Verizon already provides phone service to parts of 87 U.S. cities, 5G Home to parts of 65 cities and 5G Business Internet to parts of 62 cities.
According to Verizon, its aggressive expansion with 5G Ultra Wideband has supported an increase in data use of more than 750% year to date in advance of its commercial C-band deployment.
Verizon CTO Kyle Malady, who last week took part in a public 8K mobile video call using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 over Verizon’s mmWave, said they’re continuing to see 5G usage accelerate, with customers experiencing incredible boosts in speed, the ability to stream video and audio in HD and getting console-quality gaming on the go.
“This year our team has nearly doubled its 5G deployment versus the past two years and exceeded the aggressive targets we set at the beginning of the year, even in the face of global supply chain issues, and we’re not stopping,” Malady said in a statement. “We are on track to deliver our 5G Ultra Wideband service using C-Band spectrum to more than 100 million people in the first quarter of 2022.”
It’s notable that Verizon now offers its 5G Home service in five times the number of markets compared with 2020, and its 5G Business Internet is in nearly three times the number of cities originally projected for 2021. No doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic spurred folks looking for new home internet options, and Verizon now offers more choices in that department, including FIOS fiber broadband service, 5G Home and LTE Home Internet.
Interestingly, Verizon said its engineers just this week completed and approved plans for small cell equipment that will be deployed in the network in 2022 after the initial expansion. Besides C-band spectrum, Verizon said it will continue to expand its 5G Ultra Wideband service with the addition of a significant number of mmWave sites and private network solutions in the coming months.
By way of what it can deliver with C-band, in recent field tests, using 100 MHz and 200 MHz of C-band spectrum, the company reported seeing speeds of 1.5 Gbps and 3 Gbps, respectively. In a recent lab test using carrier aggregation (800 MHz of mmWave and 100 MHz of C-band) and a test device powered by Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System, Verizon and Qualcomm Technologies were able to reach download speeds of 7.92 Gbps.