Verizon Adds Another Arrow to Its 5G Quiver

Verizon just found a new lane for its 5G highway: CBRS, a frequency very near the C-band that, until now, the carrier has been using for 4G.

In March 2021, we tested Verizon's 4G over CBRS, getting spectacular speeds of up to 800Mbps. Combining that CBRS, using 5G, with Verizon's C-band could take those speeds well over a gig.

Both CBRS and C-band qualify as "mid-band," frequencies between 1GHz and about 7GHz where you can get a mile or so of range off a tower, but there are wide enough channels available to offer better speeds and capacity than with most 4G.

Verizon's CBRS trial comes on the heels of a T-Mobile 3-carrier-aggregation (3CA) 5G announcement, where T-Mobile is also finding new lanes of mid-band spectrum to sew together for better performance.

What Verizon and T-Mobile have in common here is a common desire to sell wireless home internet service, which takes up a lot more data usage than phones do. For that, you need a lot of capacity, so they're working hard on putting that together.

The advantage of CBRS over C-band is that it's available, at least somewhat, everywhere in the nation. C-band is currently restricted to forty-something "primary economic areas," with the rest of the country being released to carrier use in 2024. CBRS has ridiculously complicated usage rules, but the upshot at the end is that Verizon can use some of it almost everywhere.

Verizon would probably also use carrier aggregation to let people run on a channel of CBRS and a channel of C-band at the same time, where both are available.

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Verizon says it will roll out single base-station units with both CBRS and C-Band, and activate each part when it's allowed to.

The new capability will come "soon" to phones that support the "n48" frequency band for 5G, provided they get the right software update. Those include the Apple iPhone 13 line, the Google Pixel 6 line, the OnePlus 9 and 10 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy A13 5G and the TCL 30 V 5G, according to GSMArena. Phonescoop says the Samsung Galaxy S22 series also includes n48.