Verizon has the fastest 5G in the world—if you’re within about 750 feet of one of its panels.
With my home internet temporarily down yesterday, I decided to test Verizon’s millimeter-wave (mmWave) “UWB” 5G in my New York City neighborhood with the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. I got over 3Gbps when standing across the street from a Verizon panel, the fastest mmWave speeds I’ve seen yet.
The S21 Ultra, with Qualcomm’s X60 modem, also appeared to get slightly better mmWave speeds with a stronger signal than the iPhone 12, which has the previous X55 modem. The iPhone 12 was programmed to hang on to mmWave a little farther at the edge of the cell, though, leading to higher speeds on the iPhone in those edge conditions.
While 5G across most of America feels just like 4G, Verizon’s mmWave is the one form that looks truly transformative. Millimeter-wave 5G uses huge channels to deliver massive capacity, but it has painfully short range. AT&T and T-Mobile also own some mmWave, but they haven’t talked much about it recently. Verizon, on the other hand, has been trying to spread mmWave to downtowns all across America.
I have a 400Mbps home connection. That’s pretty good! Walk to the end of my block, though, and I get 1.2Gbps from the millimeter-wave connection there. Another block down to the panel and my Galaxy S21 Ultra topped 3Gbps.
Speeds like this make me pretty confused why Verizon isn’t marketing its home 5G solution more aggressively in areas where it has mmWave 5G coverage. As we found in October (and I double-checked last week), Verizon’s 5G Home service is fast, but very few people can access it—even in the cities Verizon purports to serve.
Not a Ranged Weapon
If it was purely down to speeds near a panel, Verizon would rule 5G. The problem, of course, is range. Millimeter-wave still doesn’t have it.
I got about 775 feet of range from the cell site, directly down a street with some low-rise buildings, before the mmWave cut out. The Apple iPhone 12 showed slightly better mmWave range than the S21 Ultra—about 40 more feet—but I wouldn’t take that as necessarily reflective of the hardware. The S21 seemed to be quicker to decide to drop mmWave altogether, while the iPhone 12 was happier flipping back and forth between mmWave and non-mmWave in a cell edge situation. That felt to me more like a firmware choice about what to do with weak signals.
That 775-foot range is consistent with what I got last March on AT&T’s mmWave network in Manhattan. In a dense urban area, that really seems to be the limit of mmWave range right now, and it underscores how difficult it continues to be to create solid mmWave coverage. Verizon says it aims to double its number of mmWave panels this year. It probably needs to do even more than that.
Then there’s the indoor problem. I did outdoor/indoor tests with two commercial buildings. Sterling Bank was immediately across the street from the site, while Duane Reade was more toward the edge of the coverage area. Both buildings have large, glass picture windows.
Right outside Sterling Bank, I saw the best speeds I’ve found yet on mmWave—3.152Gbps. Moving immediately inside, with a view of the cell site, gave me about half path loss—1.6Gbps. Heading inside another 45 feet to a point where I could not see the panel, 5G dropped to 4G.
Duane Reade showed a similar experience in terms of losing coverage indoors. Stepping just inside the store dropped my speed from 1.2Gbps to 850Mbps. But I only got mmWave coverage the first 15 feet from the door. Any further than that, and I’d be down to regular Verizon 4G. Verizon 4G isn’t bad—I was getting over 200Mbps—but it isn’t mmWave.
One solution for this problem is coming from Pivotal Commware, which will use its Echo window-mounted repeaters to get past glass barriers.
With mmWave handled, I also decided to see if low-band DSS 5G performance had improved at all. That’s the 5G most people in the country will see. I took the S21 Ultra out and compared it on DSS 5G to a Galaxy S20+, which uses last year’s X55 modem (same as the iPhone 12.)
I didn’t see anything game-changing. Over a mile-long walk with 14 test rounds, I got an average of 90Mbps down and 27Mbps up on the S21 Ultra, as compared to 79Mbps down and 20Mbps up on the S20+. That might mean slightly better performance from the S21 Ultra’s hardware, or it may just be down to luck; I need to do a lot more tests before nailing that down.
It does mean that Verizon’s DSS slowness issues are on the network side; there’s nothing a handset can do to fix them. In my mind, the best Verizon can do with DSS right now is turn it off, until the system provides some sort of noticeably positive difference from 4G. It just doesn’t do that right now. To compare, along the same mile, T-Mobile’s hybrid mid-band 4G/5G gave me an average download speed of 257.5Mbps.
Coming Soon: C-Band
So unless you’re close enough to throw a rock at an mmWave panel, the new X60 modem in the Galaxy S21 isn’t going to rock Verizon subscribers’ worlds. Yet. Verizon 5G seekers should still buy this phone, not for what it is now, but for what it will be soon.
Verizon is said to have been the biggest bidder in the recent C-band auctions, and we will probably hear which frequencies it received around the end of February. I anticipate that Verizon will have won the lion’s share of “A-block” airwaves, which can be used at the end of 2021, and that Verizon will move in 2022 to swiftly set up much faster 5G around most large cities.
The S21 series and iPhone 12 phones, for now, support C-band; other phones do not—yet. That’s a reason to get these forward-looking phones.
