Month: January 2021

Verizon store

Verizon Continues 5G Expansion

Christian

Earlier this week, Verizon announced a few planned expansions of its 5G services.

5G Home Internet

Starting January 14, Verizon’s 5G Home Internet will be available in parts of five more cities:

  • Anaheim, CA
  • Arlington, TX
  • Miami, FL
  • San Francisco, CA
  • St. Louis, MO

The service will be available in Phoenix, AZ starting January 28th.

Ultra Wideband 5G

Later this month, Verizon plans to bring Ultra Wideband 5G to parts of three more cities:

  • Colorado Springs, CO
  • Columbia, SC
  • Knoxville, TN

By my count, that will bring the total number of cities will Ultra Wideband coverage to 64.

City

5G Is For The Future

Christian

I’ve written regularly about 5G being overhyped. The performance improvements 5G technologies offer don’t have much practical value. Not yet anyway. 4G connections are easily sufficient for most things normal people want to do on their phones.

While I think T-Mobile executives have been particularly guilty of overhyping 5G on Twitter, I’m seeing some common ground with Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s President of Technology. The other day, Ray approvingly tweeted about someone suggesting 5G is for the future:

Neville Ray tweet

In 2004, the year the iconic Motorola RAZR V3 was released, it would have been hard to imagine the purpose of a 50Mbps cellular connection. The idea of watching videos on a phone probably felt a bit silly. Fortunately, innovation moved ahead anyway.

Even though I make a fuss about the incessant BS and marketing gimmicks around 5G, I’m sure we’ll eventually find great use cases for the technology. Maybe in five or ten years, it’ll be extremely common for people on laptops to access the internet with low-cost, high-performance cellular connections. Perhaps 5G will enable a huge expansion in the Internet of Things. Honestly, I’m not sure what will happen. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

Verizon building

Verizon Further Pushes Back 3G Retirement

Christian

In an earlier post about network operators’ plans for phasing out 3G, I wrote:

It’s possible some network operators won’t stick to their current deadlines (plenty of early deadlines have already been pushed back).

At one point, Verizon was saying it would mostly phase out its 3G network by the end of 2019. Later, Verizon pushed the deadline to the end of 2020. Today, Mike Dano of Light Reading reported that the deadline has been pushed back once more.

As of this moment, it’s unclear when Verizon will push 3G-only devices off the network. Activations for 3G-only devices continue be prohibited.

Verizon building

No Throttling Of Verizon’s Ultra Wideband Mobile Hotspot

Christian 2 Comments

Verizon’s premium unlimited plans (Play More Unlimited, Do More Unlimited, and Get More Unlimited) come with 15-30GB monthly allotments of mobile hotspot data. The 15-30GB hotspot allowances only apply when using hotspot data through Verizon’s 4G LTE or 5G Nationwide service.

In July, I shared a post about Verizon’s rarely discussed policies for hotspot use with the network’s 5G Ultra Wideband service. At the time, subscribers on Verizon’s premium plans were allotted 50GB of full-speed, Ultra Wideband hotspot use each month. Verizon suggested it would throttle hotspot speeds to 3Mbps for subscribers that burned through their data allotments. Here’s a screenshot I pulled from Verizon’s website in July:

Screenshot of Verizon account interface showing a 5G hotspot allotment

I no longer see that usage graphic in my Verizon dashboard. Instead, I see graphics like these:

Verizon data usage graphs

As best as I can tell, Verizon no longer throttles heavy users of Ultra Wideband hotspot data. Reddit user albert1735 recently provided some corroboration. Yesterday, the user shared a video showing speed tests pulling several hundred megabits per second after over 70GB of hotspot use in a single month.

While there aren’t data caps or throttles for Ultra Wideband mobile hotspots at this time, I expect they’ll come back once Verizon’s 5G deployment is further along.