Verizon says that its 5G Ultra Wideband technology has achieved upload speeds of 1.26 Gbps using commercially available devices in a live network environment.
The lab work and field trials utilized 20 MHz of LTE spectrum and 400 MHz of mmWave spectrum from the 28 GHz band. The company used devices that are currently on the market and did the testing in a “live network test environment.”
The carrier cites previous trials that produced download speeds reaching 4.3 Gbps via aggregation of C-band and mmWave spectrum.
Verizon won between 140 MHz and 200MHz of C-band licenses in all markets where the spectrum was available. Initially the company deployed as much as 60 MHz in 46 markets, then soon added as much as much as 100 MHz in 30 more markets. Going forward, Verizon says that it will be able to deploy 5G Ultra Wideband using the full 140 to 200 MHz of C-band spectrum as satellite companies that previously held those licenses move out of that portion of the band.
Verizon says that it controls 294 MHz in the sub 6 GHz spectrum (low and mid band) and 1,741 MHz in high bandwidth mmWave spectrum. The latter would include the 28 GHz spectrum that Verizon used to achieve the 1.26 Gbps speed.
When it all is deployed, Verizon will be able to provide peak download speeds of 2.4 Gbps, the company said.
“We have achieved remarkable speed in downloading using various combinations of spectrum in our world-class spectrum portfolio,” Adam Koeppe, Verizon’s Senior Vice President of Technology Planning, said in a press release. “This new achievement indicates how much additional performance we can unleash for our customers on the uplink as we aggregate different combinations of spectrum.”
Verizon has bet heavily on the C-band. It was the big winner of the C-band auction, with 3,511 licenses won on bids of more than $45.4 billion. In all, approximately $81 billion was bid.
