Kellen in News 2 years ago

Here’s a List of 25 Cities Where Verizon Made “Major” 5G Upgrades

In the early days of 4G LTE, we had a lot of fun sharing the rollout of each carrier’s network as they turned on upgraded wireless experiences city-by-city. For 5G, the enjoyment hasn’t exactly been there, thanks to the complicated nature of 5G, which 5G a carrier might be focusing on at the moment, whether or not you will ever connect to it, or if it’ll even improve upon your current LTE connection.

We’re now several years into 5G’s arrival and the overall experience is improving from one carrier to the next. While T-Mobile jumped out to a huge lead thanks to its already-owned mid-band spectrum, Verizon and AT&T are doing their best to catch-up now they also own mid-band after spending billions on C-Band spectrum. Mid-band 5G, for those not familiar, is the most important of all 5G bands because it is both fast and can cover large areas.

But again, because of the complexity of 5G and explaining it to customers, a carrier almost needs to go city-by-city to tell you what you should expect from 5G where you live. In recent weeks, I noticed that Verizon is doing just that.

At the end of February, Verizon started highlighting cities that had received 5G upgrades, calling many of them “major.” They’ve since highlighted at least 25, some of which are major cities that up until these past few months, might not have given you the best experience.

An example, because I live here, is Portland, where Verizon says “major upgrades” to the network have pushed 5G Ultra Wideband (their fastest 5G) to 56% of people and are hitting median peak download speeds of 367Mbps. Another would be Fresno, CA, where Verizon says that 86% of people are now covered by 5G Ultra Wideband. We also have news out of Atlanta that says Verizon UWB now covers 79% of people. Anyway, you get the point.

Where these individual highlights from Verizon become useful is in the details beyond those percentages and speeds. Some of these write-ups tell us how many macro and small cell sites have been deployed, which areas of a city they were deployed in, and how much more spectrum they’ve activated. It’s the type of stuff you can nerd-out about or just nod and say, “Cool man, it’s about time.”

Here is the full list of recently upgraded cities: