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Verizon Communications Network The Internet Wireless Networking

Verizon's 5G Network Is Now Hitting Gigabit Download Speeds (theverge.com) 88

A month ago, Verizon's 5G coverage in Chicago was exceedingly difficult to find and the speeds were only noticeably faster than LTE. Now, Chris Welch from The Verge says the company "has ramped things up." While coverage "remains extremely limited" and "varies widely block by block," the speed is lightning fast. From the report: I just ran a speed test that crossed 1Gbps, and my mind is frankly a little blown. This is in the real world, where my iPhone XS Max is barely hitting 20Mbps in the same spot. Download speeds on Verizon's 5G network now feel like a proper next-gen leap over current LTE performance. Going over 700Mbps is very typical, and crossing that gigabit marker can happen regularly if you're standing near one of the carrier's 5G nodes, which utilize millimeter wave technology to achieve the faster download rates.

I'm still walking around Chicago and testing things out, but here are a few quick tests I ran: The pilot episode of The Office downloaded from Netflix at "high" quality in eight seconds. That's not a typo. I pulled down Marvel's Iron Man 2 from the Amazon Prime Video app at "best" quality in 90 seconds.
Welch balances his excitement by saying that "indoor coverage on Verizon's 5G network is basically nonexistent." Also, "uploads are still limited to LTE on Verizons 5G network" and "tethering with the Galaxy S10 5G isn't yet supported (at 5G speeds)."

Another thing to think about is the fact that barely anyone is on Verizon's 5G network right now. When people actually start buying 5G devices, the 1Gbps speeds will surely drop.
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Verizon's 5G Network Is Now Hitting Gigabit Download Speeds

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  • by paiute ( 550198 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:06AM (#58607106)
    Now I can hit my cap in a jiffy!
    • by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:48AM (#58607200) Journal

      Yeah, he probably came close to hitting his monthly download cap soon after downloading that copy of Iron Man from Amazon.

      But, hey... don't let that little nugget of truth interrupt this lovely advertorial from The Verge. It's nice to see that it's not just Apple who's buying positive news coverage from them now.

      • by phayes ( 202222 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @06:43AM (#58607372) Homepage

        Add to that, the 5G coverage is very spotty even in the "covered" areas and he was quite literally told to stand "there", turn "that" direction and don't move to get the best speeds. Having to search for sweet spots like it was a Pokemon Go game isn't what I call real-world, It's just an outdoor lab.

        • See, your world, is their lab. They are testing this stuff on random volunteers - whoever's dumb enough to walk around Chicago.
      • Nah, he'll be fine. If you download the 'Best Quality' version of Iron Man 2 it's only 12minutes long.

      • New motto:

        "5G - it microwaves your brain!"

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:17AM (#58607134)

    One of the main remaining points of having Verizon as a carrier this days, is they are very good at getting repeaters into places so you get better indoor coverage than other carriers...

    Now with 5G, you have to be standing outside for coverage! I don't know how many of you have been to Chicago but spending a lot of time outside is often not a great experience.

    I'm sure over time some of that will get ironed out but reading abut the technical issues with 5G coverage I wonder how long it will be before it's as practical and widely available as LTE is today.

    • One of the main remaining points of having Verizon as a carrier this days, is they are very good at getting repeaters into places so you get better indoor coverage than other carriers...

      Now with 5G, you have to be standing outside for coverage! I don't know how many of you have been to Chicago but spending a lot of time outside is often not a great experience.

      I'm sure over time some of that will get ironed out but reading abut the technical issues with 5G coverage I wonder how long it will be before it's as practical and widely available as LTE is today.

      I would guess VZW and the other carriers are looking at solving that problem sooner rather than later. Once they make 5G a way to provide high speed access to homes and small businesses they know have a way to enter the ISP market in areas where they do not have fiber. It also means they can stream their content, such as DTVNow, over their network and and bundle phone, ISP, cable anywhere they have a network and not just where they have pulled fiber. Once 5G is widespread enough I would not be surprised if

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Once they make 5G a way to provide high speed access to homes and small businesses they know have a way to enter the ISP market in areas where they do not have fiber.

        5G requires fiber for backhaul - there's no way it can go much farther out than the fiber without drastically reducing bandwidth due to the limitations of radio spectrum being a shared medium. A single fiber can carry 100Tbit of bandwidth with current DWDM technology. That's 100,000 users at 5G speeds per fiber without oversubscription. 20:1 oversubscription isn't unusual for residential capacity, so a bundle of 10 fibers can serve any city.

        • by ksw_92 ( 5249207 )

          Not true...lots of cells use P2P microwave for backhaul to a POP that does have fiber. Small cells can use same-band backhaul, too. It's all about how you manage your spectrum re-use.

          But 5G-NR is not just about huge bandwidth to the Net. It's also about robust low-latency, low-bandwidth links that enable fast-reaction-time processes (i.e. autonomous cars) to be mobile.

    • by doug141 ( 863552 )

      Now with 5G, you have to be standing outside for coverage!

      Would an antenna on my window or roof do the job?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The main reason why it only works outdoors is that the millimeter wave (real 5G) service is extremely short-distance, with very poor penetration properties. All types of RF Reflective Glass (like most glass that has been installed in commercial buildings since about 2000) block it. Most concrete and steel block it. At the current deployment standards, a single antenna can serve about a 500 foot radius, line-of-sight.

      Pretty much, 5G is designed for high-density, localized spaces. For example, an airport,

    • I also wonder how long it'll take before the back bone becomes the bottleneck (as it already is with many telcos). That is, one person using 5G near-exclusively doing a download for a press piece is one thing, but how's it going to work when there are a hundred people all doing similar, or all trying to read their farcebook when a few people are downloading porn or whatever...?

      If the UK experience is anything to go by, the radio bit is a pretty small part of the whole puzzle. For years, "4G" carriers claime

  • Environment Study (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quall ( 1441799 )

    I hate to be that guy, but what about environment and physical harm studies? Anything harmful in that regards so far? After all, it uses radiation and microwaves (i.e. fluffed up as "millimeter" waves to sound nicer). China, India, Poland, Russia, Italy and Switzerland are not allowing 5G. The UK has blocked it until studies prove it harmless. The US's standard for microwave use in communication is that it doesn't burn your skin. All those other countries are stricter, and block it because radiation in thos

    • Does it matter? You can download "Avengers" in under 90 seconds.

    • I hate to be that guy, but what about environment and physical harm studies?

      Oh no! Microwaves! Hate to tell you but we've been using microwaves for the best part of 70 years and about the only health impact that you get is if you stare down a high powered directional horn (localised heating in your eyeballs causes blindness).

      There is zero impact about those scary sounding technical worlds to the human body beyond that.

      As for the bans:
      - Switzerland, two cantons have banned 5G as the result of the decision of two individual people, one of them a green party member who thinks we shoul

    • On a technical level, 5G still affects your atoms. It does not ionize them which is the destructive part of radiation, but it does "vibrate" them. Nobody knows the longer-term affects that this will have on your body or local animals because nobody has performed detailed studies.

      The bulk of 5G operates at 24-86 gigahertz. This is far, far below the 1 petahertz frequency needed for ionizing radiation. The "vibrating" you wave as a scary bogeyman is also known as "heating." If you're afraid of vibrating y

  • Speed and latency (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @06:23AM (#58607294)

    Latency is the sum of the hops. You'd have to be stupid or a politician to believe this is what is going to make real time (fill in the blank..surgery, education, nuclear sub remote control, IOT door nobs...) possible. Making one hop of 36 faster doesn't speed up the other 35.
    These days, insufficient band width usually isn't the bottle neck. I have a very good connection at work. Outlook is still as slow as shit. Faster downloads isn't going to make Outlook or anything else faster. The accounting system is physically in the office on a server with way less than 1ms ping times and HUGE bandwidth (no wireless, all wired). It is still slow. (Yes. It the server has plenty or RAM, CPUs and SSDs on RAID arrays). Bloated code will waste any and all additional hardware and bandwidth you give it. This just means that the next gen of phone apps can be less efficient and still function.
    Speeding up the occasional multi-gig download that happens once a month doesn't really change anything.

    • Ignorant to the point of faster wireless speed. It has nothing to do with you being able to download large files faster and everything to do with your phone limiting air time and reducing congestion on the air interface with a lovely side benefit of a significant improvement in battery life when data is actually being transferred.

  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @07:39AM (#58607532) Journal

    The "slow" iPhone Xs bandwidth of 20 Mbps is enough to stream 1440p 30 fps video real-time, with capacity to spare. The average size of an iPhone app is 34 MB, which can be downloaded in around 10 seconds at that speed.

    1 Gbps is roughly 100 MB per second of data (8 bits per byte plus throwing in 2 bits for overhead), so that's 1 GB every 10 seconds. At this point in time, on a mobile device, the primary use of that sort of bandwidth would be to download / cache entire movies quickly (or maybe finally update the Garage Band app lol). Of course between data caps, and mobile devices having relatively limited storage and free space, there's just no practical use using that bandwidth for more than 5-10 minutes in a single day. You'd fill up your storage or data cap in that amount of time.

    • I'd be happy if web pages just stayed the same size and downloaded much faster.
    • At this point in time, on a mobile device, the primary use of that sort of bandwidth would be to download / cache entire movies quickly

      Nope. At this point in time on a mobile device the use for that sort of bandwidth is browsing the internet in a way that transmits data faster with less active air time thus reducing airwave congestion and increasing battery life at the same time.

  • the hype train!

  • by zarmanto ( 884704 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @07:57AM (#58607622) Journal

    Welch balances his excitement by saying that "indoor coverage on Verizon's 5G network is basically nonexistent." ...

    Here's a crazy idea: Let's make that the standard going forward, specifically so that couch potatoes will have a reason to get off their duff and go outside.

    (More sheepishly) And, uhhh, yes... I'm including myself in that group.

  • on a family medical emergency. I've been haunting hospitals, offices, and airbnbs all around the city. One thing this has taught me is that Verizon's cell coverage in Chicago sucks. It's like going back in time fifteen years, you have to stand outside in the rain and snow so your voice stops dropping out in calls, even though your phone reports fair to good signal strength. This is true, not just in miserably poor neighborhoods like Garfield Park, but in the much more economically diverse Hyde Park and the gentrified West Town.

    In places that have reasonable voice performance, data speeds on my 4G LTE phone have often been much less than 4G LTE promises; I've been seeking out public wifi access points, even though I have an unlimited data plan.

    Verizon clearly cannot deliver even 4G's theoretical speeds in Chicago, even when there is enough signal strength. If that is due to radio congestion, switching to 5G here might help for a while because you can take advantage of some newly allocated spectrum. But Chicago is a vast city with a huge population. I doubt that Verizon is prepared to provide 1GB per second download speeds to more than a handful of customers here, much less 20GB/s. It's like buying a house with an 18" water main; the water can't fill that pipe except when nobody else in the neighborhood wants water.

  • Just to point out .. of course he's getting amazing speeds on a network with nobody on it yet.

    5G in millimeter wave is supposed to max out (theoretical) at 20gb/s down and 10gb/s up.

    That speed sounds great, but you'll only realistically reach it if the transmitter and receiver are directly connected and have 400mhz available for the single transmission.

    5G at VZ frequencies also only goes maybe 100 meters before becoming indistinguishable from background noise.

    So it's all wonderfully fast, as long as you're practically on top of the "street level macro" cell.

    In the US at least, the only companies that will develop 5G in anything like we're accustomed to are Sprint and T-Mobile, as Sprint has 2.5ghz and TMO has 600mhz band spectrum they are deploying on.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    it seems given the limited range and available of the 5G nodes, might as well just put up wifi hotspots. Cheaper and everybody already has the devices to consume it.

  • My husband's brand new Motorola phone on Verizon's 4G network can't even get 70 kB/s download speeds.

  • by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Friday May 17, 2019 @09:08AM (#58608138) Journal

    Given that indoor coverage of 5G was reported as virtually non-existent, I'd bet that WiFi coverage in Chicago currently blows away 5G coverage. I know that virtually everywhere I go in my location, I have WiFi coverage. On the highways, no, but that is a very short part of my day.

    The telecoms have already admitted that 5G is going to be a metropolitan-type technology and will not serve rural areas. If we simply went all-in on public WiFi and added it to metropolitan highway systems, we could get most of 5G now for vastly less capital layout.

    Of course we won't do that because it would leave the telecoms perilously close to not being needed. The cable companies would be in a much better position to deploy it, and in many cities have already created large WiFi networks. I can pick up my cable provider's WiFi along most of the routes I travel daily.

  • So just how much low energy radiation does it take before it is considered high energy radiation? Immediately at the cell towers I am sure is the strongest signals... anybody happen to know if there are safety regulations in place around them? Now that we are talking about even faster speeds and more energy involved... are those regulations changing?

    I've also heard of some telcos going to smaller more frequent towers in neighborhoods instead of one big tower for 5G. What's the deal with that?

  • I'm not sure what real world the summary is living in, but here in my real world I can easily get more than 100mbps, and I live so far on the outskirts of the city that I can see the sign saying the city ends from my house. LTE-A (1-2bars signal if I'm lucky). Sounds more like a problem with American Telecom companies rather than with 4G.

  • your phone can be hacked, cracked and everything on it uploaded in just a few minutes. Definitely progress!

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