Here's the truth about Verizon's 5G network

It's early on for Verizon's 5G network. Probably too early. I spent about six hours testing the all-new Big Red 5G network on the second day (Friday, April 5th) of its launch in Chicago. It's very small and not very reliable. But it's a start.

Here's the good news: out of 291 tests, including 64 made in 5G and the rest in 4G, the Moto Z3 phone with its new 5G Moto Mod got a higher average download speed than a LG V40 tested in 4G at the same place . I've seen peaks of 600 Mbps on the 5G device, on several different cell sites, compared to 400 Mbps peaks on the 4G device. It's already a 50% improvement. Hurray! Right?

It will become detailed and technical. If all you want is a buying tip, the advice is not to buy, at least as of April 2019. The Verizon 5G network is made up of a few cell sites endowed with the same hardware. old firmware and lacking key features. Software upgrades and later versions will turn this network into something you want, but you do not want it right now.

It is different from Verizon to launch something before its time, but the carrier seems to have been in a race against South Korea to announce the availability of the "world's first compatible 5G phone". The launch of Verizon was originally scheduled for April 11, but it was postponed until April 5, then April 4, apparently to learn more about Korean carrier projects. As Verizon's Moto Z3 Mod went on sale April 3, and the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G went on sale on April 5, I guess Verizon has the right to boast.

I can not help but think that this is one of the few cases where marketers have triumphed Verizon engineers. A lot of things are missing on this network. Would Verizon have a hard time holding back until mid-May, when the Samsung phone will be launched in the US? I do not think it would have occurred in terms of actual sales, and that would have been a more worthy launch of Verizon. But then he would not have been able to boast "First !!! 111!" as some YouTube commentators jumped on Red Bull.

This story will mention "future software updates" as a solution to almost anything. As the last revision of the 5G standard was only published in December, the infrastructure providers of the operators have not yet been able to debug and activate all of them. the promised features up to now. The good news is that a lot of this information will be broadcast live.

We'll be going to Chicago in late May or maybe July to see how things are changing.

Modding Up

For now, the only way to access Verizon's 5G network is to connect a $ 350 Moto Mod accessory to your Moto Z3 phone at $ 480. Evan Blass, responsible for reliable leaks, says the first integrated 5G phone, the Galaxy S10 5G, is coming on the 16th of May.

The Z3 plus its Mod are larger than the S10 5G and less powerful than a smartphone. But they will also be much cheaper. At the list price, you can get 5G with the Moto Z3 for $ 830. The price for the Galaxy S10 5G has not been announced, but it will be higher than the Galaxy S10 +, which starts at $ 999. I'm waiting at $ 1,249.

We examined the Z3 and discussed the Mod before. When you turn it on, it takes over the phone's modem functions and reports its battery status and its connection status. Some have called it "slapping a point of Wi-Fi access on a smartphone", which is not entirely correct. For now, it does not even work as a Wi-Fi hotspot; this will come in a future software update (the Mod is currently running as a USB modem, with a USB-C port at the bottom). In all cases, the hotspot mode uses 802.11ac and not 802.11ax, which means that the Wi-Fi access point may be slower than the 5G connection.

The Mod's secret sauce is the USB 3 pogo connector located on the back of the phone, which can transfer data up to 5 Gbps faster than any first-generation 5G network. Motorola would not confirm that the Mod would work with future phones, but that was strongly suggested. he is also working to make it work with the existing Moto Z2 range. So, this Mod could allow to create a complete range of first Verizon 5G phones.

Mod battery life is not great. It works with its own 2000 mAh battery. The phone will not charge it and when the Mod's battery is flat, you will be back to 4G mode. I started using my Mod at 9:30 am and he was dead at 2:30 pm in the afternoon. I passed a speed test every two minutes and made a request for location every minute, with two breaks of half an hour. Call four and a half hours of constant location and transmission time requests. Of course, you do not transmit much, and location requests burn the battery, but it still seems short. Verizon and Motorola say the battery life will increase as the network improves, which is true for cellular devices in general; they last longer when they do not have to fight.

Verizon's service plan is simple: if you use one of the current unlimited plans, you have $ 10 more for unlimited, never-before-seen 5G data. The 5G data will also be free for the first three months because the network is not really ready.

Ugh, flicker

Now let's talk about flicker.

Moto Mod only displays its "5G UWB" icon when actively transferring 5G data, not when 5G service is available. It is therefore very difficult to know where you have 5G coverage. The background processes move the data, so you sometimes notice that the 5G icon flickers when you are in a 5G coverage area, but it will not be a reliable indicator of coverage just like any other network status icons.

To test the speeds and try to extend the coverage, I used a custom Ookla on-site test application to run speed tests every two minutes, intertwined, on the Motorola phone and on a 4G phone LG V40 separated. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, parent company of PCMag.com). I've also had an automated process that captures a screenshot every minute and saves the location, in order to detect the blinking of the 5G icon.

Even with this whole race, the icon would fall to the 4G when I was almost certainly on the 5G (like when I had not left the previous 5G test and that I was going to little near the same speeds). Verizon must change the behavior of this icon to indicate 5G when the 5G signal is available. The good news is that this could be done in a software update.

Left: 5G on a Moto Z3. Right: 4G, probably with LAA, on a LG V40.

Speeds: just to start

Verizon uses a 5G shape called a millimeter wave (mmWave) that promises extremely high speeds but a very short range compared to towers. The speed also decreases rapidly when you move away from a cell site or if you go to the inside. Currently, mmWave cell sites can use up to 400 MHz of spectrum. Verizon indicates that it has a spectrum of 800 MHz or more in many areas and will be able to use it when it receives the appropriate software update. This will greatly increase the speeds.

The use of mmWave has the advantage of allowing enormous speeds. Ericsson, Verizon's infrastructure provider in Chicago, has made great promises in a white paper published in 2018. "A 26 GHz NR 200 MHz TDD system … can provide very good DL coverage to external users–for example, 50 to 60% approaching 1 Gbps. With wider frequencies, such as 400 MHz, it is possible to achieve speeds of several Gbps, "says the company. Verizon currently uses a 400 MHz frequency in Chicago and has a fiber backhaul.

In real life, I saw a maximum throughput of 600 Mbps while in theory, using a spectrum of 400 MHz should allow to activate up to 2 , 4 Gbps on mmWave 5G NR. That's all, guess what? First software.

"Frankly, it will increase rapidly," said Mike Haberman, vice president of network engineering at Verizon.

It is also important to note that not everyone uses mmWave or exclusively. AT & T and T-Mobile will combine mmWave with the low band 5G band, which will likely lead to coverage and abandonment trends that are much closer to LTE and 30 to 50 percent faster than LTE. LTE technology. Sprint uses the 5G bandwidth, which will provide coverage similar to Sprint's 4G network and rates between 400 and 600 Mbps, depending on the carrier.

At just about every 5G NR site that I found, I fell between 500 and 600 Mbps when I was near the site. It would decrease rapidly with distance, as I will come below.

This scatter chart is a lot of fun, but take it with a grain of salt. It shows the download speed of each 5G test that I have spent, in chronological order. This is not really useful, but it's cool to watch. The tendency between tests 10 and 30 shows me that I am moving towards a site, that I am moving away from it, that I am returning to it, and that I am moving away in a different direction. This group of high speeds on the right corresponds to a homogeneous coverage area 5G in the west loop; the small group of low speeds in the middle of it is when I walked into a stone building. I will discuss it in more detail below.

One thing to watch for right now is not the maximum speed, but the minimum speed. At present, few applications need 1 Gbps on a mobile device. However, many applications (like video streaming) prefer 6Mbps to 2Mbps. LTE tends to have very low soils–when it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, it is rotten. My first tests in 5G show that the 5G already has higher floors than the 4G. If that holds, then even slow 5G speeds will be a significant improvement over difficult LTE situations– provided there is a blanket.

Downloads and latency were much more disappointing. 5G networks are assumed to have a latency of less than 10 ms. But the average latency of 25.7 ms was no better than that of LTE (25.1 ms). Transfer speeds, averaging 19 Mbps, were lower than the average 4G download speed of our V40 phone at 42 Mbps.

Verizon gave an explanation with which you will become familiar: 5G shipments are not yet activated. These are LTE downloads. They are waiting for a software update. The latency will also improve over time, the carrier said.

You must understand that there are ways in which the LTE is even more advanced than the 5G NR, although that changes. LTE has progressed in the complexity of its coding (called QAM or quadrature amplitude modulation) and in the number of antennas that it can use at the same time (called MIMO, or multiple inputs, multiple outputs). Current LTE networks support 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM, four data layers, and eight bits per symbol.

At the moment, 5G NR supports 2×2 MIMO and 64 QAM, which is two layers and six bits per symbol. But the technology supports 4×4 MIMOs on handsets and even massive MIMOs at the base station, as well as more efficient coding types. We just have to wait for devices and capabilities to evolve.

We have seen this change with LTE too. When LTE networks were launched in 2011, they were not always faster than the AT & T and T-Mobile HSPA 3.5G networks, which caused quite a disaster when AT & T and T-Mobile have decided to declare HSPA in 4G. But LTE had a lot more room to grow than HSPA. As standards continued to evolve HSPA + to a point where it could theoretically reach 336 Mbps (although US operators have never gone further than the 42 Mbps version), Qualcomm now has 2.4 Gbit LTE support / s.

This evolution will apply to the AT & T, T-Mobile and Verizon millimeter-wave networks. They all have the same versions of the same Ericsson software. This might not apply to Sprint, which uses massive Nokia MIMO base stations on a lower bandwidth spectrum; which has a whole set of different challenges.

A base station only waits for its 5G panels.

Cover: Pretty Limited

Verizon says it covers the Loop, the West Loop and the North Loop in Chicago, basically until North Avenue. I walked for three hours and found that the coverage was very uneven and did not extend north to Chicago Avenue. But I also found towers that seemed not to have been lit yet or on which I suspect Verizon is about to install a 5G equipment.–There is a series of towers along North Avenue, every few blocks from Sedgwick to the lake, that seem almost ready for operation, and my 5G indicator flashed briefly around North and LaSalle. It was not enough for my coverage program to capture me or to do a speed test. I guess it's part of a group of sites that are not quite sure yet.

"I have sites ready to be used and other sites are deployed, deployed and ready to operate," Haberman said.

I found a blanket in the loop, a lot in the west loop, increasing coverage in the North River area and nothing north of it in the old town.

And here is where I saw the 5G:

Now here is where I thought I've seen active sites of 5G cells. The northernmost icon could be blocked. I've also probably missed a few; I obviously miss one in Chicago and LaSalle and another in Clark and Lake, I did not observe them and I did not have time to go back and check. Verizon really aims for a high density here, with one site per block or two. Note their density in the west loop-IThat's every block. I've had a consistent 5G coverage during a walk in the West Loop, but I've never been to more than a block away from a cell site.

Range: not quite there yet

Verizon said his sites have a range of about 800 feet. I saw more like an effective range of 300 feet, with speeds going down below LTE levels beyond that, even though my 5G indicator blinked conscientiously up to about 450 feet. The Mod seems unable to judge when a 4G connection would be preferable to a 5G connection, so it remains attached to the 5G for a lifetime, even if it's only a few megabits. A phone should probably prefer a good low-end connection to a poor, high-generation connection.

The graph above shows speeds measured at 50 feet interval by walking south along Michigan Avenue from a cell site. I think what we see on the LTE line is not LTE as most people know, but LAA, the short-range LTE that uses Wi-Fi and generally takes off after 200 feet. Note that the 5G site has about the same curve as the LAA site. No, I do not know what happened with the LTE phone at 350 feet.

This graph shows the speed drops at two different 5G sites, touching one from two different angles. The gray line runs south on Michigan Avenue Avenue from a site, keeping a permanent line of sight with only clean air between us. I arrived at about 350 feet before the gears got low enough.

But what's new with these two other lines? With the orange line, there was a raised horse bridge between the 50 and 100 foot markers. This seemed to really interrupt the signal, which was then slow but steady for the next 200 feet.

The yellow line is the same cell site as the gray line, but at a right angle, in a narrow street between tall stone buildings. It also seemed to really kill the speeds.

Verizon and all the other players in the industry tell me that this type of removal will be repaired by a better system of training and guidance of the beam, which you will guess soon in a future software update.

"The steering and shaping of the beam continues to progress," said Haberman of Verizon. "These could be radically different over the next two months, the cell's boundaries will change."

Now, before you start shouting, "My suburb / my area / my rural area has no use for sites with only 800 feet of reach!" and "They are not going to put a cell site on every block in my city!" You are right and they will not do it. This is a highly centralized configuration, and carriers are already implementing these complex systems to handle intense LTE traffic.

The unanswered question is whether millimeter waves will work in any other type of environment. Verizon says that this will be the case and that, with an appropriate beam direction, it reaches a distance of 3,000 feet. But I would like to see that in action.

Hit the wall

Comparison of 5G speeds, indoor and outdoor

I was able to discover another disturbing quality of millimeter waves in a Starbucks located on Jefferson Street in the West Loop. Stand under the cell site, you get 600 Mbps. Go to the Starbucks, through the glass, and it's cut to 218 Mbps. Go around the corner and enter the lobby of a stone building that does not face the site and you have fallen to 41.5 Mbps. The lower frequency bands do not have this behavior.

I am comfortable to say that you will not receive a millimeter signal, if you are at more than one glass wall of the cell site field of view. It's really bad. Verizon believes that future software updates, including beam training and guidance, will dramatically improve performance.

Are these sites ugly?

In terms of ugliness, you need to understand that 5G simply adds two panels to an existing small LTE cell. Here is what a small LTE cell looks like without 5G:

A Verizon cell site on North Avenue that does not have 5G yet, but will probably be soon.

Here is a close up on a 5G cell site. You can see that there is not really much difference. If you are arguing against small cells, you lost the battle a few years back in the LTE era. If you are just starting to argue against small cells now because they are unattractive, after not noticing for two years, well … think about it.

This is what a Verizon cell site looks like with a 5G panel.

Here is what a 5G site looks like in an urban context, in the west loop:

Here's someone whose Photoshop skills are pretty much tied with mine, helping to explain what you see:

A small diagram of what is here. pic.twitter.com/IFIOr74QhM

– Jonathan (@ gusherb94) April 5, 2019

Verizon Bulletin 5G

We were promised a lot of features to come with the 5G. Low latency, for example, is supposed to be a key element of the new system, but it is not yet transformative. Verizon insists that it has 800 MHz spectrum in many cities, but can not yet use all that spectrum. On the other hand, until a few weeks ago, base stations could only handle 100 MHz spectrum.

Here's a quick "newsletter" of some of the key features I saw and did not see in Verizon's network:

I think this network will improve materially during summer school. Before the 5G became a crazy race to activate a network as early as possible in the spring, it seemed like things would really begin to take shape in the middle of the summer. For now, Verizon, Motorola and Ericsson have a lot of studies to do if they want to live up to what they promised in their lavish presentations.

It is the long term

To understand why Verizon invests–why is everyone really investing–it's worth revisiting the growth of 4G speed in recent years. We have been monitoring 4G speeds in the United States and Canada since 2011 (in the United States) and 2013 (in Canada). Canadian networks are better than US networks, on average, so I wanted to show the two growth charts.

5G, the first day, averages 215 Mbps. If it follows the 4G speed growth charts in North America, we should have an average of 327 to 495 Mbps by 2021 and 1.2 to 1.5 Gbps by 2025. C & P Is an average, notice; many speeds will be higher. It depends on many factors, of course, the main one being that our government is releasing a lot more spectrum for 5G in the next few years.

Really, it's only the beginning. Verizon is committed to activating 30 cities before the end of the year. AT & T currently claims to have 12 cities working with a hotspot, which I will check soon. Sprint and T-Mobile will likely be launched in May and June.

I've been talking with different industry players and they tell me that new software is coming up every week for 5G base stations. Things are going extremely fast. By the time you read this, they may have changed. We are going all across this country this spring and summer, checking all that, and we will report on our findings in June.

For more information, check out our 5G Race feature.