Verizon Targets 175 Million for C-Band by Year's End

pcmag.com:

Verizon will cover about half the US population with its "Ultra Wideband" network by the end of 2022, the company said at an analysts' day today.

“We imagined a world of hyper-connectivity and massive capacity, knowing it would inspire innovation and new use cases. We see immense momentum today and what has us most excited is that we know that our network will support use cases that have not yet even been imagined," CEO Hans Vestberg said at the event.

The presentation showcased a new Verizon that's completely focused on providing telecom services. The company sold its Verizon Media unit—formerly known as Oath, Yahoo, and AOL—to private capital firm Apollo Funds in mid-2021, and purchased massive prepaid wireless firm Tracfone in 2020. The result is a Verizon that is no longer talking about online advertising, and is instead focusing on being the nation's first "national broadband provider."

Much of that broadband goal relies on C-band. C-band is Verizon's new mid-band 5G network, with speeds considerably higher than 4G. Verizon launched the network in January and says it currently covers more than 100 million people. The company has a coverage map up; in our initial testing, we found that coverage map overstated the coverage, but we haven't tested in several weeks. Verizon is now claiming peak download speeds of over 1Gbps on C-band.

We have a list of all of Verizon's current C-band phones, as well as test results from the launch.

According to FCC documents, the 46 partial economic areas where Verizon is currently allowed to deploy C-band had a combined population of 177,149,623 in 2010. (Wireless watcher Nicholas Thomas pointed out on Twitter that they now have a population of 191 million, giving Verizon a bit more