Verizon: If You Didn't Move to Florida Recently, You Probably Moved to Texas

pcmag.com:

Texas has received a "massive, pandemic-related influx of people" since January 2020, and the Austin area has seen the fastest growth by far, Verizon Wireless revealed today(Opens in a new window).

Verizon knows where its customers live, so it can chart out the areas to which those customers relocate. Texas has been the #2 destination state behind Florida since early 2020, Verizon said, with "more than 200,000" Verizon customers moving to the Lone Star State. (Florida gained a quarter-million.)

They aren't evenly distributed. Austin has seen a 323% increase in data traffic since January 2020, while Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have only seen 74-84% increases, Verizon said.

"The pandemic changed many things about how and where people use their Verizon service,” said Kyle Malady, EVP and President for Global Networks and Technology. “We are committed to delivering the very best possible network experience to our customers, including those who are permanently changing locations to Texas and other places."

Texas has been the heart of 5G rollouts since they began. All four of those Texas cities now have Verizon's high-band mmWave and mid-band C-band 5G coverage. Of AT&T's eight early C-band cities, three of them (Dallas, Houston, and Austin) are in Texas.

Houston was one of Verizon's first 5G cities, with a proto-5G system(Opens in a new window) launched in 2018 before the real 5G standard was even set. Dallas and Houston saw launches for both AT&T's fast "5G+"(Opens in a new window) and Sprint's 5G network between late 2018 and mid-2019.

But Austin was relatively slow and later to the game than the others. By December 2020, Dallas had around three times the number of 5G small-cell site permits as Austin, and Houston had