Network management

Verizon has recently completed lab trials with Corning and begun lab trials with Samsung on new 5G mmWave in-building solutions which, when commercially launched, will provide 5G mmWave coverage inside facilities such as hospitals, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, ports, retail stores and more. The launch of these indoor cell sites will not only extend the footprint of Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, but will also bring the promise of private networks with Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) capabilities one step closer.

The Federal Communications Commission held a ground-breaking, marathon virtual event Sept 14, hosting numerous stakeholders in the wireless ecosystem to discuss open radio access networks (RANs). The main impetus for the event was to promote open RAN technologies for 5G as an alternative to RAN equipment from the Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE. Currently, the choices for telecom equipment are fairly limited to the big vendors Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei.

T-Mobile announced that supercharged mid-band 5G is live for millions more people in parts of 81 new cities and towns across the country, delivering peak download speeds of up to 1 Gbps and average speeds of around 300 Mbps, 7.5x faster today’s average LTE speeds. With the announcement, this 5G experience is live in nearly 90 cities and towns, and the Un-carrier plans to continue lighting up this optimal 5G spectrum at an aggressive pace, reaching thousands more by end of 2020.

For the first time, we are now comparing 5G users’ overall experience across 12 of the world’s leading 5G markets. Globally, our 5G users in Saudi Arabia see the fastest overall average download speed with a Download Speed Experience of 144.5 Mbps ahead of Canada’s 5G users in second place with 90.4 Mbps. Strikingly, 5G Users in the country with the highest adoption of 5G to date, South Korea, rank just third.

[Aug 12's] decision is a massive victory for US leadership in 5G, our nation’s economy, and American consumers. The court rightly affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to ensure that infrastructure deployment critical to 5G—a key part of our 5G FAST Plan—is not impeded by exorbitant fees imposed by state and local governments, undue delays in local permitting, and unreasonable barriers to pole access.

I am pleased that the Ninth Circuit affirmed the wireless infrastructure reforms we adopted in September 2018. I thank the Federal Communications Commission staff who carefully crafted the order, and I congratulate the Office of General Counsel for their successful defense of our work. Small cells that power 5G were threatened by exorbitant fees and unnecessary delays—red tape that was tolerated when building macro towers but would have brought small cell deployment to a halt.

A federal appeals court has upheld most of the Federal Communications Commission's orders speeding the deployment of cell service buildouts by easing regulations on those 5G deployments, including pole attachments and various local reviews of buildouts. Specifically upheld were the Small Cell Order, the Moratoria Order, and the One Touch Make-Ready Order, all parts of the FCC's Accelerating Wireless Broadband Deployment by Removing Barriers to Infrastructure order. 

T-Mobile is the first operator in the world to launch a commercial nationwide standalone 5G network, and with this move, the carrier is expanding 5G coverage by 30 percent, now covering nearly 250 million people in more than 7,500 cities and towns across 1.3 million square miles. Standalone architecture is the future of wireless connectivity, bringing 5G closer to reaching its true potential with faster speeds, lower latency and massive connectivity.

On June 1, 2020, Republican Members of the House Commerce Committee wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai in support of the "5G Upgrade Order" which the FCC considered at the June 9, 2020 meeting. "Reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens to promote broadband deployment is a top priority for Congress, and we urge the Commission to approve this Order at your June Open Meeting," the Reps wrote.

AT&T announced that it had achieved nationwide coverage for its 5G network, joining T-Mobile, who reached that important goal Dec 2019. AT&T announced about a month ago that they have turned on a technology called DSS (Dynamic Spectrum Sharing), which allows 4G and 5G phones to use the same frequencies.