Verizon plans to speed up rural 5G service this year

Rural clients subscribed to Verizon’s 5G community may see a bounce of their speeds later this year. The telecommunications big revealed plans throughout its quarterly earnings call this week to prolong its C-band 5G network — which makes use of a radio spectrum that permits sooner speeds on a large scale — to extra rural and suburban areas by December 2023.

We don’t know particularly which areas the enlargement will cowl. During the earnings name, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg talked about that the corporate’s C-band 5G protection has thus far been deployed to 70 out of the 406 obtainable markets, largely in city and suburban areas. “It’s 330 markets left, we will get the C-band,” mentioned Vestberg. He didn’t make clear what number of of those markets could be lined by the community enlargement later this year however confirmed that almost all of the deployments coming will focus on suburban and rural areas.

C-band spectrum is an important a part of Verizon’s plans for rural enlargement. It can’t match the intense speed of millimeter wave spectrum (mmWave), however C-band can work over a far larger vary with fewer cell towers. It additionally doesn’t have as many points penetrating by way of buildings as mmWave and needs to be noticeably faster than Verizon’s customary 5G deployments.

Verizon spent $45.4 billion to acquire C-band spectrum licenses at a Federal Communications Commission public sale again in 2021, profitable between 140 and 200MHz of C-band spectrum throughout all 406 US markets — 158 of that are thought of “mostly rural.” Rollout has been incremental as a lot of the spectrum licensed was already in use and requires clearing earlier than it may be reallocated, although the acquisition primed Verizon to finally serve over 250 million folks with C-band spectrum by “2024 and beyond” through its 5G service.