Verizon plans to speed up rural 5G service this year

Rural clients subscribed to Verizon’s 5G community might see a soar of their speeds later this yr. The telecommunications big revealed plans throughout its quarterly earnings name this week to increase its C-band 5G community — which makes use of a radio spectrum that allows quicker 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. Through 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’ll get the C-band,” mentioned Vestberg. He didn’t make clear what number of of those markets could be coated by the community enlargement later this yr 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 could actually’t match the intense velocity of millimeter wave spectrum (mmWave), however C-band can work over a far better 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 quicker than Verizon’s commonplace 5G deployments.

Verizon spent $45.4 billion to amass C-band spectrum licenses at a Federal Communications Fee 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 “largely 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 ultimately serve over 250 million folks with C-band spectrum by “2024 and past” by way of its 5G service.