By Mike Dano, 2/4/2019
For eight full days spread across December and January, from dawn until dusk, Earl Lum of EJL Wireless Research drove around Sacramento looking for Verizon’s 5G.
“By the end of it, I got pretty good at geomapping,” he said.
It was no small task. In traversing the city, Lum had to travel through a few “dodgy” neighborhoods, got chased by a dog, and had other adventures. “I wasn’t happy with that dog,” he deadpanned.
To find the company’s network in the city, Lum looked up the street addresses serviced by Verizon’s 5G Home service and then drove around until he spotted the cell sites that provide service to those addresses.
The results of Lum’s work are significant — and not inspiring. Verizon is currently using the network to sell stationary, in-home broadband services — $70 per month for speeds of 300 Mbit/s and up — in a challenge to wired Internet providers like Charter and Comcast. Verizon has said it plans to expand that effort into more cities at some point later this year, and will also launch mobile 5G services sometime this year. (See Verizon Confirms Mobile 5G in ‘Early’ 2019.)
So what does Verizon’s initial 5G effort in Sacramento (one of its four 5G Home cities) look like? Below are three observations Lum made while surveying what he estimated were 99% of Verizon’s 5GTF cell sites across Sacramento (the analyst is selling a complete report of his work on his website).
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