Tested: Verizon's New 4G Beats 5G, Big Time

Verizon is rolling out an enhancement to 4G that absolutely blows away its own "nationwide" 5G, and that shows good signs for the new C-band 5G coming in 2022. CBRS, a set of airwaves close to the C-band, has quietly started rolling out nationwide. I got a tip on two locations near me, so I went to check it out.

I tested CBRS in Fresh Meadows, Queens, a low-rise neighborhood east of me, as well as my own Jackson Heights neighborhood. In both places, CBRS appeared on sites configured for all of Verizon's latest technologies: 4G, its "nationwide" DSS 5G, and its super-speedy ultra wideband (UWB) 5G.

My Fresh Meadows CBRS 4G test topped out at 815Mbps on a Samsung Note 20 Ultra, with DSS 5G only hitting 358Mbps on an iPhone 12 in the same location. Verizon's UWB millimeter wave crushed both of them, with a top speed of 3.4Gbps.

But CBRS has a major advantage over millimeter wave on range: While UWB carried the usual 800 feet or so from its cell site, the CBRS signal kept up for half a mile.

In Jackson Heights, the CBRS-enhanced 4G got to 456Mbps, while 5G DSS at the same times and similar locations hit 232Mbps, and I've previously seen UWB at around 3.2Gbps. Once again, though, I got better range from CBRS than from UWB, although not by as much as in Fresh Meadows. (I'll explain why below.)

From C(BRS) to Shining C(-Band)

CBRS is a 150MHz swath of airwaves that sits right below the C-band. It's licensed in a nearly incomprehensibly complicated, multi-tier way that varies from county to county. Many of the CBRS licenses in my area are controlled by companies that are (for now) just sitting on them rather than running a network, specifically Comcast, Charter, and Dish.

CBRS panels are required to operate at much lower power levels than other cellular frequencies, meaning they have shorter range than C-band will. (Dish, a big owner of CBRS, is currently lobbying to get those power limits raised.)

On the chart above, green is low-band licensed airwaves, red is mid-band licensed airwaves, and blue is for unlicensed, Wi-Fi-like airwaves.

In Queens, Verizon has 40MHz of CBRS, out of the 70MHz that was made available for licensed use. That's similar to what AT&T will have with nationwide C-band at the end of the year, and less than the 60MHz of C-band that Verizon will have.

C-band will almost certainly perform better than CBRS. It's roughly the same frequency, but runs at a higher power level and (in Verizon's case) with more spectrum. Considering how well CBRS performs, that's a very good sign.

4G in the Fast Lane

Verizon achieves these killer 4G speeds by combining five channels of spectrum for a total of 90MHz. In my test, that was 20MHz of band 2, 20MHz of band 66, 40MHz of CBRS, and 10MHz of band 13. The CBRS was purely additive; it didn't replace anything, so when it wasn't around, my phone was using 50MHz rather than 90MHz.

That heaping helping of CBRS helps Verizon almost catch up with T-Mobile's mid-band 5G, at least here in Queens. As you can see in this chart, without the blue chunk of CBRS, Verizon is way behind T-Mobile on spectrum usage (and potentially also speed). But CBRS brings Big Red almost on par.

I'd still expect Verizon's CBRS approach to be slightly slower than T-Mobile's under the same load with the same tower. (The whole equation is complicated by the fact that different towers have different backhaul internet connections.) T-Mobile's one big channel of 5G is more efficient than Verizon's two smaller channels of 4G. But Verizon has 60MHz of C-band 5G—just as big as that purple chunk on the T-Mobile chart—coming up at the end of this year, and that should be an even bigger boost to Verizon 5G than CBRS is to Verizon 4G.

Speeds dropped on DSS 5G because the sites weren't allowing DSS 5G to combine with CBRS 4G. If you have a Verizon phone and covet that "5G" icon, you'll be giving up the 40MHz of CBRS and trading it in for, usually, 10MHz of 5G, for a net loss of 30MHz. Better site firmware coming soon will let Verizon boost DSS 5G with CBRS 4G, to get that "5G" icon with the faster CBRS speeds. Regardless, up to 90% of the traffic will still be flowing over 4G until C-band arrives, making that "5G" primarily window dressing for now.

This opens up the question: Why isn't Verizon using 5G for CBRS? With a single 40MHz 5G channel, they could be getting even better performance than they are with two 20MHz 4G channels. (There's some performance lost when you bond separate channels.) They would be able to avoid the really embarrassing appearance of 4G being a lot faster than 5G, and could break free of disappointing DSS.

Insiders tell me that the Nokia radio hardware Verizon is currently using does not support 40MHz channels of CBRS 5G. (The FCC has only approved it for 20MHz channels of 4G.) More importantly, current smartphones do not flexibly support CBRS 5G, which is known as band n48.The Samsung Galaxy S21's firmware shows that it can flexibly combine 4G CBRS and 5G C-Band, and it's less capable at combining them when they're both 5G. So Verizon gets a bunch of technical and performance advantages, at least for now, by keeping CBRS 4G.

What Is CBRS Range Like?

I got a .46-mile range in Fresh Meadows and a .26-mile range in my own neighborhood.

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Going to Fresh Meadows was important to show how different cell sizes can be in different areas. My neighborhood, Jackson Heights, is considerably denser than Fresh Meadows; we're largely six-story brick apartment buildings, while Fresh Meadows is generally one-story homes punctuated by three-story apartment buildings. Fresh Meadows looks much more like the average American city, from Columbus to Houston.

A denser neighborhood means smaller cells, more sites closer together, and your phone switching cell sites more often.

As per CellMapper.net, the nearest sites to the Fresh Meadows site in my direction of travel were 0.66 and 0.9 miles. In my denser neighborhood, the nearest sites in my direction of travel were 0.57, 0.42 and 0.39 miles. (CellMapper isn't perfect, but it's the best we have.)

The CBRS site in my neighborhood, therefore, showed a smaller radius before my phone switched sites. That doesn't necessarily reflect the maximum range of CBRS, but may reflect how many sites Verizon has in the area.

Can Your Phone Use CBRS?

CBRS is available on most phones sold in the past two years. Check the specs for LTE band 48. If the phone supports it, and you're on Verizon, it will kick in where available.

Of course, you may have to turn 5G off to get it. Hopefully, Verizon will tell its CBRS towers to push 5G phones back onto 4G for now, icon be damned. If you want to try fooling around with turning off 5G, here's how to do it on an iPhone. Recent Samsung phone owners can do it by downloading the third-party Samsung Band Selector app.

Because of CBRS's extremely patchwork nature, it's not going to be everywhere. I prefer to see it not as a big statement about Verizon 4G, but as a good sign for the future of 5G. Verizon has nationwide licenses for C-band. If C-band, like CBRS, brings 700Mbps speeds with a half-mile radius around each tower, that'll become the true citywide 5G experience that Verizon customers have been seeking.

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