Verizon Wireless has just announced that their ultra fast, ultra reliable 5G Ultra Wideband service is now covering more than 175 million people. This is a goal they accomplished 1 month early. They also will be offering nationwide 5G Ultra Wideband in Q1 of 2023. The C-Band rollout is still being drawn out, but is actually ahead of schedule by about 13 months.
“Our customers don’t stand still and neither does our network. Today, more than one out of every two Americans now have access to 5G Ultra Wideband. We know our customers rely on our service every day and we work for them – continuously enhancing, expanding and improving our wireless network,” said Hans Vestberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon. “And as proud as I am to have crossed this milestone, I am equally proud of the way we are building our network – with the most advanced technologies, industry leading security, a robust fiber underpinning and a robust and varied spectrum portfolio. We are building this right. We are building this as a platform for innovation for years to come.”
Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband has been compared to wired broadband for its performance. Download speeds, for example, have shown up to one gigabit per second. This allows customers to do anything from “downloading huge documents and seamlessly streaming movies in HD audio and video, to playing console quality games and conducting video chats, video conferencing and FaceTime calls with clear sound and video.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Over the coming months, the company plans on continuing its build out of the 5G Ultra Wideband network using C-band spectrum. This will take place more so in rural and suburban areas. Verizon will also enhance capacity by activating 100 MHz of C-Band spectrum in many markets, which is a big increase from the 60 MHz of spectrum available when deployment first began. Eventually, all of its licensed spectrum will be made available, up to 200 MHz, which will provide exceptional speed and capacity.
Engineers have not forgotten about the mmWave spectrum. This provides exponential capacity in areas with significantly dense populations such as venues, stadiums, arenas, airports, major metro areas, office complexes and more. Private network deployments will also benefit from mmWave. Enterprise customers would opt for this if they need the fastest, most robust 5G service available for their applications.
Providing increased security, reliability and customized experiences for customers is very important to Verizon. Advancements will be taking place which include:
- Fully deploying the 5G core with Verizon’s proprietary cloud platform built specifically for telco workloads
- Advancing the fiber network to handle exponential increases in data traffic
- Continuing massive virtualization of the network to add programmability and flexibility into the network
- Using artificial intelligence to drive reliability and performance
- Continuing to develop edge computing capabilities to drive down latency
- Continuing to advance antenna configurations to drive speed and efficiency
