Six more cities are getting Verizon’s home 5G service and three are getting its high-speed mobile 5G service this month, as the carrier continues the hard work of spreading fast millimeter-wave 5G across the country.
Verizon’s high-speed UWB 5G mobile service, which we’ve seen to have peaks over 2Gbps, will come to Colorado Springs, Colorado; Columbia, South Carolina; and Knoxville, Tennessee, this month. UWB 5G is hard to build, requiring small cell sites placed close together, and tends to primarily cover downtown areas outside, but there’s a potential shift coming.
Verizon partner Pivotal Commware also announced the availability of small, inexpensive UWB 5G repeaters that can be easily placed on roofs and windowsills to extend coverage.
UWB 5G is now in more than 60 cities nationwide, generally along major streets on or around downtown areas. For instance, here’s the coverage in Milwaukee right now:
In some cities, UWB 5G covers more of the city, but you can still tell from the map how painstaking it is for Verizon to achieve any coverage with the short-range network technology. Here’s the current map for Indianapolis—the darkest red color is UWB 5G, which is in “hotspots” around the city but don’t cover the whole area.
Home service is coming to: Anaheim, California; Arlington, Texas; Miami; Phoenix; San Francisco; abd St. Louis this week. Verizon’s millimeter-wave-based home service typically offers download speeds of 300Mbps with peaks of 1Gbps. Our tests on its mobile service, which use the same technology, have shown upload speeds generally of 30-100Mbps.
Both systems rely on millimeter-wave technology, which has huge, exclusive bandwidth but has generally only shown about an 800-foot radius from cell sites in our tests. Verizon’s “nationwide” 5G, which has greater reach, reuses 4G airwaves and has performance similar to 4G.
In the coronavirus era, Verizon’s $50 home gigabit service is a more compelling concept for many people than its outdoor-focused UWB 5G mobile service, but it’s hard to tell how many people in each city can actually get the home system. Like most other home ISPs, Verizon doesn’t publish a coverage map for home service, instead requiring you to punch your address into a qualifier form. When we looked at home service in Chicago and Minneapolis in October, it fell short of their UWB mobile coverage.
That may change based on two new technologies. Pivotal has talked about in-home repeaters that, when placed on rooftops or outside windows, can help stretch 5G coverage to more homes. And Qualcomm has talked about better 5G antennas that are too large for mobile devices but can fit into home internet units.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg is talking about 5G at CES on Monday. Hopefully he’ll discuss expansion plans.
