Verizon notches up 14,000 new mmWave cell sites

Verizon announced the company has exceeded its year-end target of 14,000 new 5G Ultra Wideband cells sites, providing 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, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and, launching today, Athens, GA; Knoxville, TN and Tacoma, WA. This aggressive expansion has supported an increase in 5G Ultra Wideband data use of more than 750% year to date in advance of its C-Band spectrum commercial deployment, which will cover 100 million additional customers before the end of March 2022.

“We’re continuing to see 5G usage accelerate, as our customers experience benefits, like incredible boosts in speed, the ability to stream video and audio in HD and the ability to get console-quality gaming on the go,” said Kyle Malady, CTO of Verizon. “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. 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.”

In addition to 5G Ultra Wideband smartphone service, Verizon is accelerating its broadband roll-out across the nation. Verizon now has 5G Home available in five times the number of markets compared to 2020, and 5G Business Internet in nearly three times the number of cities originally projected for 2021. Providing customers with more, high-quality Internet choices is resonating with new 5G Home customers using the same amount of data as customers that have long used Verizon’s award-winning FIOS fiber broadband connection. Whether it’s FIOS, 5G Home or LTE Home Internet, Verizon has something for everyone.

Driving innovation and further expansion
Verizon has been working diligently, securing agreements with tower partners, installing C-band equipment, and driving performance of 5G on C-band. Verizon’s network team has already deployed 5G Ultra Wideband equipment to thousands of cell sites and will continue aggressive expansion into the new year to meet its market promise of providing 5G Ultra Wideband service to 100 million people by the end of the first quarter of 2022 using C-Band spectrum.

The massive 5G Ultra Wideband expansion will initially involve deploying new C-Band equipment on macro cell towers, leveraging Verizon’s award-winning LTE network infrastructure. This rapid expansion will also involve deploying the new 5G Ultra Wideband service using small cells, enhancing both access to and the capacity of 5G using C-band spectrum. Just this week, Verizon engineers completed and approved plans for small cell equipment which will be deployed in the network in 2022 after the initial expansion.

In addition to rapid expansion using C-Band spectrum, Verizon 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.

Driving speed
In addition to the expansion of 5G access through mobility, fixed wireless access, and private networks, Verizon and its suppliers have continued to push the limits of speed on 5G. In recent field tests, using 100MHz and 200Mhz of C-band spectrum, the company has seen speeds of 1.5 Gbps and 3 Gbps, respectively. And 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, Inc. were able to reach download speeds of 7.92 Gbps.

Built for customization
This expanded 5G service is built on Verizon’s flexible network infrastructure with virtualization in all parts of the network and artificial intelligence powering resources in the network. Network resources can be right-sized for customers’ varied, personalized, and customized needs in near real-time. CT Bureau