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Verizon Shows Off Millimeter Wave Home Router, Antenna

Verizon this week gave the media a closer look at the router that will fuel the company's upcoming, ultra-fast 5G fixed wireless service. As we just noted, Verizon will be conducting trials of this service in 11 cities in the coming months: Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Bernardsville (NJ), Brockton (MA), Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Sacramento, Seattle and Washington, DC. These trials will allow Verizon to better understand the varying technologies that comprise the 5G standard, when it's finished either late this year or early next.

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But unlike the home-mounted "cantenna" used in Verizon's past fixed-wireless efforts, this new 5G-fueled service will utilize a new Samsung router attached to a small antenna mounted outside of the subscriber's windowsill.

This router and antenna will utilize 28GHz "millimeter wave" spectrum, which historically is notably fussy when it comes to line of sight issues (interference from walls, weather and pigeons). As such, this initial service appears better suited to more dense urban environments than many of the more rural DSL communities Verizon has been consistently hammered for hanging up on.

PC Magazine got an early look at the new router, antenna and utility-pole-mounted base stations while at the Mobile World Congress trade show this week in Barcelona. Verizon made it abundantly clear to the magazine that it's not really clear yet how widespread this particular millimeter wave effort is going to be.

"It'll be a long time before we have millimeter wave everywhere," Verizon's director of network planning Sanyogita Shamsunder said. "How large the scope of this will be, that is to be determined."

"Most walls aren't that bad," Shamsunder added, while talking about line of sight issues. "Standard vinyl siding, insulation, we can build through that [signal] loss. Standard windows, single pane, very little loss. But solid thick wooden doors, that's a problem."

Most recommended from 34 comments



SimbaSeven
I Void Warranties
join:2003-03-24
Billings, MT

5 recommendations

SimbaSeven

Member

No rural trials?

I am a little curious on.. why?

Zenit_IIfx
The system is the solution
Premium Member
join:2012-05-07
Purcellville, VA
·Comcast XFINITY

2 recommendations

Zenit_IIfx

Premium Member

How good can it be?

Bandwidth is no longer a major issue with well managed sectors on LTE. I'm not worried about bandwidth capacity. How good will the connection quality of milimeter wave 5G be? Latency will obviously be better than LTE which can already hit fairly low round trip times, but will jitter be reduced? Will sudden random ping spikes be eliminated? Will the data cap be big enough to accommodate most users without having to take out a second mortgage?

A major flaw with this fixed 5G plan is the fact that you need fiber to pretty much every single pole in a rural area. In the cities you also need to build out a significant last mile to support the load and have adequate coverage with weak millimeter wave signals. The cost of an ONT has plummeted over time. I am finding new in box optical network terminals around $150-300 depending on vendor and feature set. Verizon probably gets bulk discount from Nokia and Arris on their ONT orders. How much does the 5G node cost? $2500? I don't see the savings in this wireless solution when you just look at physical factors. All this does is cut out the last 500-2000ft of infrastructure with a workaround band-aid. The only other places in the world cutting corners in this fashion are third world countries. Verizon must be looking at labor cost, because I don't see how this would save money in areas where they already have FiOS.

This does make sense to enter markets where VZ doesn't offer fixed service. Beyond that I am baffled. Even in VZ's DSL-only footprint they will still hit most of the cost of building out FiOS running fiber to every 5G node.

Perhaps the grand plan is to charge installation to people who want real FTTP, while offering the fake FTTP WiOS at a lower price, sort of like the Comcast Gigabit Pro model. If your within 500-1000ft of a drop terminal it isn't hard to run service from there.
pittpete1
join:2009-06-12

2 recommendations

pittpete1

Member

This is how the Zombie Apocalypse starts....

Everyone's soft tissue will be fried