Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) has announced an expansion of the 5G Nationwide services to more customers across Upstate New York, OK, New England, Central Texas, and Tusla. The company said that around 24 million more people will access the advanced 5G nationwide network bring the total of people accessing the network to 230 million in 2,700 cities.
The 5G service launched in October and it uses dynamic spectrum sharing tech which uses a low spectrum band shared between 4G LTE and 5G. The company plans to move the 5G networks to a standalone version where LTE is not involved but this could be a multi-year effort.
5G Ultra Wideband available in 61 cities
Also, the carrier has expanded the 5G Ultra Wideband network to Tampa, Durham, Albuquerque, and St Petersburg. This brings total coverage of the 5G Ultra Wideband to 61 cities which indicates that the company has lived to its promise to deliver the network to customers in around 60 cities by the end of 2020. The service uses mmWave spectrum which is either 28 GHz or 39GHz giving customers fast speeds.
With the fast speeds, customers can stream TV shows and download movies within seconds as well as collaborate remotely and videoconference in near real-time. Verizon says that enterprise customers in the cities now have access to 5G Ultra-Wideband technology that will help expedite digital transformation, revolutionize interaction with customers, manage operations, and track inventory.
mmWave for 5G Ultra Wideband travels short distances
Verizon however points that there is a problem with the mmWave spectrum which is poor propagation characteristics and short distant travel of signals. Rival T-Mobile has also been pointing the problem out at every opportunity. However, Verizon is adopting the latest technologies to address this issue but for the nationwide layer, it is employing DSS. Some analysts argue that the use of DSS or lower bands results in service that is less the same as 4G LTE. Verizon says that its underlying network infrastructure has been built on cloud-native containerization infrastructure allowing high operational automation and adaptability.
