BARCELONA—The best hope for home Internet competition in the US right now is a rectangular black box that looks rather like a Bluetooth speaker. We gave Samsung's home router for Verizon's 5G service one of our Best of MWC awards because the state of home Internet competition in the US is dire, and we're hoping to be rescued.
A third of Americans have only one option for high-speed home Internet, and they pay through the nose for it. Most of us don't know how badly we have it. At home in New York City, I personally pay $65/month for 70Mbps down with Spectrum Cable. Here in Barcelona, 200Mbps from Jazztel costs 18 euros (about $21) per month. According to a report commissioned for the Canadian government, Americans pay by far the most for broadband of seven countries surveyed, and those include big, sparsely populated Canada and Australia.
Verizon has pledged to deliver pre-5G to 11 cities by midyear, picking up where its Fios fiber build left off. We can only hope that it'll juice up competition and lower prices. Here at MWC, we got the first look at the new service's base stations and home router units.
The black Samsung router has four Ethernet ports and a blue status display on the front which will show signal strength and diagnostic data. It functions as a Wi-Fi router, although Samsung's VP of network strategy Alok Shah wouldn't give the exact Wi-Fi specs for it. They may not be locked down yet.
When Verizon says that this is gigabit service, it means a gigabit at the cell's edge, Verizon's director of network planning Sanyogita Shamsunder said. Nearer to the cell, you'll see several gigabits per second. Samsung's demo unit was running 4Gbps to one router.
The spectrum Verizon intends to use, 28GHz "millimeter wave," is picky. Shamsunder says that with a clear line of sight, it can go several kilometers from a cell site, but in dense suburban areas, they'll have to put cell sites every half-mile or so. Samsung showed me a photo of a supposed setup, which is a base station the size of a small backpack (shown below) strapped to a neighborhood light pole or utility pole.
Samsung is also running complex simulations—which I wasn't allowed to take pictures of—that model entire neighborhoods to determine what window everyone should put their routers in. The service works best when the router is in a window facing the cell site. The idea is to avoid "truck rolls" of Verizon staff and let subscribers install their own modems, with online help.
Whenever I run one of these home broadband stories, I get frustrated comments from rural Americans who aren't getting the latest ISP technologies. Verizon's 5G service won't satisfy them either, because of the short range from its cell sites. But Samsung's Shah said help might be on the way in the form of a new swath of spectrum called CBRS. CBRS, which could become usable in 2018, is low frequency enough that a fixed-wireless signal to a home could go for miles, potentially connecting folks who right now have no wired option. AT&T and Google are currently testing services in the CBRS band that could become home ISPs in the future.
"It'll be a long time before we have millimeter wave everywhere," Verizon's Shamsunder agreed. "How large the scope of this will be, that is to be determined."
Testing, Testing
There are still a lot of unanswered questions with this service, and it doesn't look like Samsung and Verizon are hiding them. They're still figuring them out, and figuring out how to build the network, where to build the network, and how customers are going to set up the equipment.
The companies are currently running tests around the country, including in a neighborhood in Euless, Texas, near Dallas where various houses are kitted out with pre-5G equipment, Shamsunder said. The test equipment isn't as elegant as the box Verizon will eventually sell, as you can see in the photo at right.
The important element in the photo is actually the little silvery antenna at the bottom. About the size of a paperback book, it's placed outside the window of a house to receive the 28GHz signal, which notoriously doesn't penetrate all walls. It would then broadcast 802.11ac Wi-Fi throughout your home.
"Most walls aren't that bad," Shamsunder said. "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."
How to deal with apartment buildings is an open topic at Verizon right now, as some of the units may not have windows facing the right direction for the best signal. But think of where people put TV and satellite antennas, and you'll be on a path as to where to put the 5G antennas.
"High rises are a challenge," she said.
Shah said Samsung is still thinking about whether to offer the external antennas as well as the home router unit, and how all of the physical placement is going to go. For instance, many people like to have their Wi-Fi routers near the center of their home for best coverage. So, would it be better to run cable from an external antenna to a location near the center of the house, and put the router there, as opposed to having the router and antenna be a single box placed in a window? Samsung and Verizon are still figuring that out.
Samsung's router won't be the only pre-5G equipment available on Verizon's network, Shamsunder said. It's just the first, with "multiple vendors" coming.
One thing you aren't likely to see in this cycle is 5G mobile phones, though. Expect those to start popping up in 2019 or 2020.