Verizon Turns on 5G Uploads in 34 Cities

Video calls on Verizon 5G are about to get even smoother. The company announced today that it's finally switching uploads from 4G to 5G in its 34 5G cities (with a 35th one coming soon), as well as for Chicago-based 5G Home subscribers. It also made several announcements about partnerships to help its short-range millimeter-wave 5G reach longer distances and get indoors, although those shifts won't happen immediately.

5G is a new technology, but it's still highly dependent on 4G. Current 5G networks are known as "non-standalone." Phones rest on 4G networks, and have to use 4G to negotiate 5G connections. Until now, Verizon's and AT&T's 5G networks also generally used 4G for uploads.

Uploads have become a hotter topic recently as more people are transmitting video in their quarantined lives. Verizon said on May 14 that collaboration tools, which use uplink, are at 1,200 percent the usage of the pre-COVID days. Comcast says uploads have increased by 33 percent while downloads have only increased by 13 percent compared to a March 1 baseline. 

"We look at the ratio between downlink and uplink and maximize that for the usage being done," said Heidi Hemmer, Verizon's VP of technology. "Yes, we have seen more use of uplink [since COVID-19.]"

Verizon says 5G uploads should only be 30 percent faster than before, but that may be expectation management. When we first tested 5G uplink in Providence, Rhode Island, last year, we found that it increased average uplink speeds from 37Mbps to 93Mbps. Ookla Speedtest later looked at crowdsourced results and saw an average of 50.55Mbps up, still a 78 percent lift from 4G.

The company will use 100MHz of millimeter-wave 5G spectrum for uploads, Hemmer confirmed. Currently, the company generally uses no more than 20MHz of LTE for uploads.

Some T-Mobile 5G devices use a combination of 4G and 5G for uploads, but as T-Mobile is using relatively narrow channels in its long-range low-band 5G network, I've seen speeds more like 33Mbps up in my tests with the OnePlus 8 Pro.

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We don't talk enough about uplink. On 4G networks, upload speeds are at most a third of download speeds, as shown in our Fastest Mobile Networks 2019 testing.

Landline systems are often even more mismatched. Cable providers make it very difficult to see what uplink speeds are on their sales websites. Here in New York, cable company Spectrum doesn't show its upload speeds on its sales site, and buries them in a government-mandated disclosure PDF. There, you discover that 200Mbps download plans have only 10Mbps up; 400Mbps plans have only 20Mbps up; and 940Mbps plans have 35Mbps up.

Fiber internet plans more often tend to be symmetrical, with upload speeds that match their download speeds.

There's a historic reason for the mismatch, of course. We typically download a lot more than we upload, and that amount is most lopsided at home. The vast majority of home internet use right now is video streaming from providers like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. That's all download. Even the most intense TikTokkers consume a lot more content than they produce.

Zoom recommends, ideally, 3Mbps up/down per high-quality group call. In my experience, that underestimates what you really need. If we keep having multiple people in each household trying to work or go to school virtually, a good uplink connection is going to become more important. And while you're probably not taking too many Zoom calls out on the street where Verizon 5G works well, this positions Verizon's 5G service for the wider home internet launch it still plans to do by the end of the year.

Getting 5G Indoors

Verizon's move only helps people who can get that sweet, sweet millimeter-wave 5G, though. And for now, that's very few people. Even in downtown areas of cities Verizon claims to cover, OpenSignal only got Verizon 5G 6 percent of the time in December/January walk tests. In our own tests, we've found that Verizon's mmWave 5G still works primarily outdoors, with poor penetration inside buildings and only about an 800-foot radius off each cell site. T-Mobile's slower, low-band 5G has much broader coverage.

Another announcement today aims to deal with that. Verizon said it is partnering with Movandi, Pivotal Commware, and Wistron to provide mmWave extenders that can improve signal strength and range.

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Pivotal's Echo 5G repeater, about the size of a small dinner plate, attaches to a window and "acts as a portal between indoor and outdoor worlds," according to the company. 

Pivotal also says its technology can reduce the number of 5G panels a carrier needs to place on the streets of in each neighborhood, instead putting repeaters on utility poles and on the windows of individual subscribers. According to the company, a carrier could replace 28 base stations with seven base stations and 390 small repeaters. This could help 5G deployment troubles because Verizon would have fewer debates with towns about putting up larger base stations, while its subscribers would probably be willing to use repeaters to get in-home service.

According to an article from Fierce Wireless, Movandi's BeamXR technology helps millimeter-wave signals penetrate Low-E glass, a form of energy-saving glass that's common in commercial buildings and right now presents a major barrier to indoor mmWave coverage.  

Movandi has also been tapped by Verizon, along with the more usual suspects—NXP and Qualcomm—to provide chipsets for in-home 5G devices. Movandi's technology will probably be used to help get clearer connections through windows to home 5G receivers. There's no date on when the Pivotal and Movandi solutions will be available.

Finally, Verizon's adding another 5G city, San Diego, to its list on May 28, the company said in a press release. Hemmer told us a few weeks ago that Verizon is on track to have 60 5G cities by the end of the year. 

The company says that 5G in San Diego will appear in parts of Mission Valley, Linda Vista, Kensington, and Banker's Hill. 

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