Sunday, August 2, 2026
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Opinion

Telecom tweets of the Week: Verizon takes VR, 5G to the track

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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Telecom Tweets of the Week: Verizon demos 5G

Verizon’s mobile “5G” demo at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway must be every driver tester’s dream come true — until they blacked out the windshield.

The video is worth checking out. Of course the speeds achieved (by the network, not the car, people: more than 6 Gbps in the downlink) are prominently displayed, but more interesting to me are the glimpses of the antennas that they used to enable the whole thing, and engineers Bill Goodman of Ericsson and Dan Huffman doing their thing. After a trip around the track testing uploads and downloads at high speed, techs apply black plastic sheets to the windows and windshield and put a set of virtual reality glasses on the driver so that he’s relying on images from a mounted camera on the vehicle, relayed by the millimeter wave network, in order to drive the car as a demonstration of the low latency that can be achieved with a 5G system.

“This is so weird!” the driver exclaims at one point. Indeed. I don’t know how Goodman manages to sit there so calmly, but I think he looks a little relieved when the plastic sheets get peeled away again.

In the spirit of VR catching on, Jose Ramirez of the Cleveland Indians is having such a good time with whatever he’s watching that he literally falls off his chair.

Meanwhile, Europe is looking to steal the 5G spotlight from the Olympics by demonstrating the technology first.

In a 5G trials roadmap update dated this month, there’s a proposal to make the UEFA Euro 2020 soccer championship in summer 2020 — just before the 2020 Olympics — into a PanEuropean 5G trial. The championship games will be held in 13 cities across Europe.

“The proposal is that the EURO 2020 acts as the ‘launching event’ for 5G in Europe with a number of 5G services that will be trialed around the EURO 2020 football cup,” according to the document, which floats the idea of three different types of trial services: augmented and virtual reality for fans’ entertainment, automated transportation around the stadiums and on major transit routes; and advanced public safety services including facial recognition and location services.

If you’ve never been inside a switching center, Verizon also put out a video that gives you some sense of what it’s like. Claustrophobic and crowded

https://twitter.com/VerizonNews/status/867026911708540928

Since it’s Friday and all, I am going to sit and watch the videos of Space-X’s most recent launch just a few more times. That’s a lot of firepower.

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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