Verizon this week gave the media a closer look at the router that will fuel the company's upcoming, ultra-fast 5G fixed wireless service. As we just noted, Verizon will be conducting trials of this service in 11 cities in the coming months: Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Bernardsville (NJ), Brockton (MA), Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Sacramento, Seattle and Washington, DC. These trials will allow Verizon to better understand the varying technologies that comprise the 5G standard, when it's finished either late this year or early next.
But unlike the home-mounted "cantenna" used in Verizon's past fixed-wireless efforts, this new 5G-fueled service will utilize a new Samsung router attached to a small antenna mounted outside of the subscriber's windowsill.
This router and antenna will utilize 28GHz "millimeter wave" spectrum, which historically is notably fussy when it comes to line of sight issues (interference from walls, weather and pigeons). As such, this initial service appears better suited to more dense urban environments than many of the more rural DSL communities Verizon has been consistently hammered for hanging up on.
PC Magazine got an early look at the new router, antenna and utility-pole-mounted base stations while at the Mobile World Congress trade show this week in Barcelona. Verizon made it abundantly clear to the magazine that it's not really clear yet how widespread this particular millimeter wave effort is going to be.
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