Verizon took immense pride in being the first telecom services provider to roll out 5G home broadband; however, the company has now announced that its 5G Home broadband service will not be expanded to other cities beyond the first four launch marketplaces until the fall of this year.
To be more specific, the services won’t be expanded to other cities until mid-2019.
Why the wait?
The 5G Home service by Verizon is built upon its very own, pre-standard 5G telecommunication technology dubbed 5G Technical Forum (TF).
It does make use of certain core 5G technologies such as millimeter wave, but the fixed home 5G internet by Verizon really looked like a premature rush job to beat the competitors and roar “first!”
John Legere, T-Mobile CEO, slammed it as such, and since Verizon is pausing the rollout of 5G Home until it switches everything to the industry-based 5G NR really underlines that.
(Verizon had already made it clear that they would be switching over the initial four 5G cities from 5G TF to 5G NR sometime in future). Jake Kastrenakes wrote a clear explainer on Verizon 5G Home if you wish to go through more details.
During the company’s recent earnings call, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg has confirmed that 5G Home has been completely deployed in the four cities they decided.
That comprises of certain parts of Los Angeles, Sacramento, Houston, and Indianapolis. Justifying their proud move, the company claims that 5G Home has led the industry around the world to speed up the 5G deployment plans.
As for mobile 5G, Verizon CEO didn’t provide much preview of what the coverage map of Verizon will look like as 2019 unfolds, saying that Verizon has nothing they want to disclose due to competitive reasons.
However, he promised “lots of mobile 5G and 5G Home” and said that Verizon will roll out 5G-capable smartphones as soon as they are ready. The company has already cleared their plans to roll out a Samsung-branded 5G smartphone soon while the 5G Moto Mod for the Moto Z3 is also in the pipeline.