Verizon’s 5G home internet is sort of real, sort of fake

Verizon became the first major Internet service provider to launch 5G home internet service. But, is this really 5G? The answer is sort of. 

Verizon’s chief technology architect, Ed Chan, said that the newly launched home 5G service uses a number of technologies that have been deemed a part of 5G. Most important among those is the use of millimeter wave, the radio waves that will be the backbone of 5G connections. Millimeter wave connections work over a much shorter distance, but they’re far faster, enabling Verizon to deliver gigabit speeds wirelessly. But there are other important factors to 5G, like whether all 5G devices work together and speak the same language. And with Verizon’s implementation, they don’t. Verizon is using a communications standard largely of its own making, called 5G TF, whereas the industry at large is coalescing on something called 5G NR. Even Verizon plans to switch over to 5G NR eventually. But it means that this initial 5G deployment is being done without the widely accepted 5G standard. T-Mobile CEO John Legere immediately came out with criticism of Verizon, putting an asterisk beside his references to Verizon’s 5G service. “It doesn’t use global industry standards or cover whole blocks and will never scale… but hey, it is first, right?!” he wrote on Twitter.