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5G allows for mmWave but does not require it. I have 5G in my area for Verizon but its mostly low band normal 4G frequencies. I have seen mmWave once at the fai

5G allows for mmWave but does not require it. I have 5G in my area for Verizon but its mostly low band normal 4G frequencies. I have seen mmWave once at the fair grounds and it was nice hitting 1200MBps with tons of people streaming videos etc. otherwise it seems similar to 4G on low band. The mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground, stadiums, busy downtowns, shopping centers etc. but has poor penetration and range. Verizon looks to be wanting to use is for home broadband use as well with base stations mounted all around neighborhoods. I would imagine they see it replacing WiFi with easily provisioned access points in commercial business etc. My understanding on low band is its a overlay on their 4G network for now so it works but has almost no benefit. There supposedly is benefits to the low band side such as lower latency and better spectrum sharing over 4G but it's unclear if that applies in an overlay scenario. Moving forward they will probably bring more low /medium bands on as 5G only, perhaps finally sunsetting their 3g network and refarming as 5g only.

ksec 6y ago
>mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ). It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story ) That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested. So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )

ksec 6y ago

>mmWave really shines in crowed areas like the fairground Well it really doesn't. mmWave requires line of sight, get blocked by even a pcs of paper or your hand ( if you are actually blocking the antenna ). It works in shopping centre in some cases, but that is only assuming shopping centre are actually willing to pay and built those out. Every additional cell, big or small requires additional maintenance and that is part of the reason why SmallCell in 4G never really took off. Its idea is nice ,implementation being ironed thought out in 4G and now even in 5G. But never really worked due to the business incentives. ( LTE-LAA or NR-U is a different story ) That is why, no Carrier in Asia and Europe actually plan to have mmWave for mobile. You may read some report on mmWave from certain countries, but all of them are for fixed wireless Internet. No carriers, in any of the industry forum or investor notes has actually put out a timeline for mmWave. EU put out mmWave Spectrum for auction and no one was interested. So unless there are something specific to Verizon, may be it owns more property in US where mmWave unit economics woks out better for them, or something I oversee. I dont understand why they ran with it. ( Other than some mentioned, being able to charge additional $10/m for some small benefits )