Verizon’s new 5G network is live and PCMag just tested it out in New York City. In summary, C-Band made their connections about 50% faster, once they were able to find the signal. They also noted less congestion on the network, which is likely due to it still being so new.
Starting this past Wednesday, Verizon launched its new form of 5G in 46 cities. AT&T did also, but only in eight cities.
While PCMag reports the Verizon service being noticeably improved, it didn’t measure up to T-Mobile’s citywide “5G Ultra Capacity”— at least, not yet. T-Mobile currently has the most coverage in New York City and the best performance also in comparison to its competitors.
Looking at reports from other cities, it seems that may not be the same as in New York City. Per PCMag’s report, “Redditors are busy posting spectacular C-Band speeds, including 859Mbps down in Los Angeles, 586Mbps outside Pittsburgh, and 413Mbps in Indianapolis.”
In order to test the C-Band, the PCMag team used the new Ookla WIND software. This is a carrier-grade package that runs on altered Samsung Galaxy S21+ phones. WIND’s Pro version, which the company supplied for testing, shows all the details of frequency band use you could ever need. It also lets testers build complex setups with voice, data, text, and video tests.
Verizon’s C-Band was a little hard to find during the New York tests. They ended up being able to use C-Band only on sites in two cities – Forest Hills and Kew Gardens. In other locations like East Harlem, their phone had refused to connect to C-Band, despite Ookla having identified the location as having C-Band available. It’s possible that some connections are being blocked by the carrier, or perhaps something to do with technical interference.
PCMag also addressed the “exclusion zones” that carriers agreed to with the FAA. Some of the exclusion zones are around JFK and LaGuardia airports. These are some of the busiest airports among a part of the city that is populated by about 2.3 million people. This is the same case for areas like Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego. Folks here unfortunately don’t have the benefits of the new 5G because of interference risks with aircraft altimeters.
Per Verizon, the exclusion zones are a rectangle 2 miles long extending from the end of each airport runway. In one case during the tests, they were unable to find C-Band in an arc spanning from 4 miles southeast to 3 miles southwest of the end of the LaGuardia runway. That area covers many of Queens’ densest neighborhoods. Unexpectedly, though, they found more millimeter-wave in the exclusion zone than they expected to.
“While the super-fast, short-range technology didn’t blanket the area, it kept popping up here and there throughout Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside, and Elmhurst, giving a huge boost when I could find it,” the article reads.
They continued, “I can’t tell if Verizon’s avoidance of neighborhoods closer to LaGuardia is about the exclusion zone, or just the vagaries of early network buildouts. But we can confirm that while there’s no C-Band coverage within 2 miles of the airport, there is definitely coverage between 3-4 miles away.”
So just how fast is 5G?
PCMag’s tests shows the in most cases, the C-Band service was double the speeds of LTE. This is because 5G was made more efficient and spread across multiple airwaves, making it able to provide more speed with less congestion on the networks.
The article explained this more technically. “C-Band roughly doubles the airwaves Verizon had available for use in our tests. In most of our tests, Verizon used 40-50MHz of 4G LTE spectrum. When its “nationwide” 5G was active, it added 10MHz of low-band 5G to that. C-Band trades out that 10Hz of low-band 5G for 60MHz of mid-band, resulting in 100-110MHz being used.”
In comparison to tests run with T-Mobile, Verizon was just a little less. T-Mobile generally used 40MHz of 4G LTE along with 80MHz of mid-band 5G, for a total of 120MHz.
Tests were split between the carriers’ 4G and 5G components. PCMag found that in T-Mobile’s tests, 75% of the speed came from 5G, while in Verizon’s tests, 45-55% came from 5G. They also noticed that for some unknown reason, “each megahertz of Verizon’s was slower than a megahertz of T-Mobile’s—something the bigger carrier is surely working on optimizing.”
They also discovered something rather odd. “A bunch of our C-Band results in Kew Gardens all congregated around 140Mbps down in a way that makes me think it was a configuration issue or cap, not the capability of the network.”
What about the reach of the C-Band service?
The tests performed by the PCMag team have already shown T-Mobile is faster than Verizon on their mid-band spectrums – T-Mobile at its 2.5GHz frequency and Verizon at the higher C-Band spectrum. The real question now is, which carrier delivers more range? PCMag says, “But the fact is, urban networks in places like New York, Chicago, and Dallas are dense enough that the difference may not matter.”
The case in Queens, for example, Verizon’s network is so dense that sites don’t have to broadcast very high to be received. It’s the same for T-Mobile here, whose extremely dense network in Queens has sites that are often a quarter-mile from each other or less.
From their findings, PCMag believes the jury is still out in the battle of mid-band distance. Though it is clear that C-Band has enough reach so that carriers won’t need to put a site every few blocks.
Do I need C-Band now?While C-Band is available now, it can only get better as Verizon continues to roll out service. “In many other cities, it appears to already be better; my experience in Queens looks like the low end of the C-Band experience,” said the author of the article. They added, “The C-Band boost will come primarily to places within half a mile to a mile of a Verizon cell site, so look up your location on cellmapper.net if you’re curious. It’ll also require a recent phone.”