Strike Up the C-Band: Opening New Lanes on the 5G Highway
The next big wireless wave is about to crash over us.
By Sascha Segan
The results are in. Verizon and AT&T just spent a metric ton of cash on C-Band spectrum, the tasty mid-band 5G that they’ve been missing up until now, with their combination of short-range high-band and slow low-band. Because unlike low-band, it allows wide enough channels for lots of traffic, but unlike high-band, travels more than 800 feet, mid-band is the most popular form of 5G in the world right now. Here in the US, though, only T-Mobile has had it up until now, because of some dumb decisions made by the FCC between 2016 and 2019.
The C-Band spectrum becomes available in two chunks, one at the end of 2021, and one at the end of 2023. Around the end of this year, I hope to see Verizon flip on its 60MHz of mid-band in a good chunk of the US, and AT&T to activate its 40MHz. That’s just the start. In 2024, it’ll ramp up to 160MHz for Verizon and 80MHz for AT&T (on average).
C-Band has the potential to cover cities and suburbs, and to offer multi-hundred-megabit speeds. T-Mobile is using 60MHz of mid-band 5G in my neighborhood right now, and that has contributed up to about 400Mbps in my tests. (Some testers have seen higher speeds; there’s a 655Mbps result from someone else in my inbox.)
The initial networks will only be available in 46 “partial economic areas” around major cities, but those areas are actually pretty broad; they include most of upstate New York, southern California, and Florida. An aggressive T-Mobile could still run way out ahead by simply putting mid-band 5G in places AT&T and Verizon aren’t allowed to touch yet.
There are some interesting results further down the chart, too. T-Mobile grabs a whole bunch of 40MHz blocks clearing in 2023. The carrier has a ton of 2.5GHz spectrum, more than it can use right now, but it was clearly just thinking about saving up for a rainy day.
I’d also like to call out the little guys: Horry Telephone Cooperative in Myrtle Beach, SC; Union Telephone in Rock Springs, WY; Carolina West Wireless in (guess where!). I’m fascinated by these tiny carriers’ ability to keep going in the shadow of the Big Three. I’ve half-wanted to write an article about these little guys for years; I wonder if anyone would read it. (Editor’s Note: I would.)
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Grain Management, a private capital firm bidding as NewLevel, and Canopy Spectrum, another private capital group, also bought a bunch of licenses. These companies almost always appear in auctions; they’re basically parasites, squirreling away spectrum until they can get a desperate carrier to pay more for it. But since their spectrum isn’t clearing until 2023, I’m not that worked up about it.
I want to push back against the dumb take that Verizon, a company that’s too big to fail, “can’t afford” this. At the level Verizon and AT&T operate at, money is notional; it’s a video game played in Excel. They’ll move some numbers around; somebody won’t get a dividend; something will happen with stonks. Verizon will probably use it as an excuse to raise prices, which is the actual concern.
There are some things I still really don’t understand here, that I’m hoping to have cleared up in the T-Mobile and Verizon analyst day presentations on March 10–11. Can the networks start building before the spectrum clears? Is all of the early spectrum going to clear at once, and if so, can we expect a big switch to be flipped on that day? They’ve got the airwaves; now it’s time to hear what they’re going to do with them.
What do you think about this? Let me know in the comments.
What else have I been thinking about this week?
- Mobile World Congress Shanghai went off without a hitch, unless you count “almost nobody could enter China who wasn’t already there” as a hitch. The GSMA is worried about a new Cold War leading to fragmenting wireless standards. For what it’s worth, I think MWC Barcelona will be canceled a few weeks before its late-June date, because of ongoing travel restrictions.
- T-Mobile used its mid-band spectrum to launch the only real 5G service plan in America, with no throttling and 4K video. I’m switching to it today.
- Verizon hasn’t forgotten about ultra-wideband. The carrier launched three more cities: Sacramento, Seattle, and Pensacola. As with other millimeter-wave rollouts, though, coverage can be best described as spotty.
- Apple is hiring 6G engineers. That’s a sign the company wants to be as relevant in 2030s wireless as it’s going to be in 2020s processors, or as it was in 2010s app platforms.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
