Verizon tests wireless delivery of home broadband service through 5G

Verizon Communications is betting on a robust 5G fixed wireless solution to deliver high-speed broadband to residential customers. The company has agreements with a number of U.S. cities under which the carrier has committed to deliver broadband to homes. The company was expected to use its FiOS service to deliver on these promises, but fiber builds have not progressed as planned, and now much of the FiOS workforce is on strike. In many cities served by FiOS, coverage is well below 50%.
Enter “5G” fixed wireless. Although there is no standard yet for 5G technology, Verizon has been on the forefront of testing new technologies and offering input to the standards body. Now the carrier says it has conducted tests in New Jersey showing fixed wireless speeds of up to 1.8 gigabits per second. Verizon is using a point-to-multipoint solution, with equipment transmitting in the 28 GHz spectrum band. The company gained access to more than 100 licenses in the band as part of its purchase of XO Communications.
“Clearly at Verizon our focus is on 28 GHz,” said Gerry Flynn, director of corporate technology at Verizon, during an event this week, noting the carrier’s effort to understand the steering and propagation characteristics needed “to bring massive broadband to a fixed environment. Fixed is our priority.”
This week, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam shared the results from the network test at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.
“In the example of our Basking Ridge campus, we had I think six 4K TV’s running, we had three virtual reality boxes, we had a bunch of tablets running and you could move the service back and forth pretty easily between any of those devices,” said CEO Lowell McAdam.
Verizon is not the only U.S. company working actively in the 28 GHz spectrum. Cambridge Broadband, which is 15% owned by Samsung, has been deploying in this spectrum band for several years, and is also working in the 39 GHz spectrum band. The company has a $5,000 solution that attaches to cell towers for point-to-multipoint broadcast. The solution is used extensively outside the United States, in countries that do not have the fiber backbone that exists in the United States.
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