My home internet went down, so I went outside and found incredible millimeter-wave speeds.
Verizon has the fastest 5G in the world—if you’re within about 750 feet of one of its panels. With my home internet temporarily down yesterday, I decided to test Verizon’s millimeter-wave (mmWave) «UWB» 5G in my New York City neighborhood with the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. I got over 3Gbps when standing across the street from a Verizon panel, the fastest mmWave speeds I’ve seen yet. The S21 Ultra, with Qualcomm’s X60 modem, also appeared to get slightly better mmWave speeds with a stronger signal than the iPhone 12, which has the previous X55 modem. The iPhone 12 was programmed to hang on to mmWave a little farther at the edge of the cell, though, leading to higher speeds on the iPhone in those edge conditions. While 5G across most of America feels just like 4G, Verizon’s mmWave is the one form that looks truly transformative. Millimeter-wave 5G uses huge channels to deliver massive capacity, but it has painfully short range. AT&T and T-Mobile also own some mmWave, but they haven’t talked much about it recently. Verizon, on the other hand, has been trying to spread mmWave to downtowns all across America. I have a 400Mbps home connection. That’s pretty good! Walk to the end of my block, though, and I get 1.2Gbps from the millimeter-wave connection there. Another block down to the panel and my Galaxy S21 Ultra topped 3Gbps. Speeds like this make me pretty confused why Verizon isn’t marketing its home 5G solution more aggressively in areas where it has mmWave 5G coverage. As we found in October (and I double-checked last week), Verizon’s 5G Home service is fast, but very few people can access it—even in the cities Verizon purports to serve. Not a Ranged Weapon If it was purely down to speeds near a panel, Verizon would rule 5G. The problem, of course, is range. Millimeter-wave still doesn’t have it. My iPhone 12 got speeds over 2.
