What it means to lead the race to 5G

As the wireless industry in the U.S. and around the world continues to move rapidly to bring 5G technology to its customers, Verizon has made it clear: when it comes to 5G, Verizon was first out of the gates and has no plans on slowing down.

Verizon’s senior vice president and chief technology architect Ed Chan recently gave a keynote presentation at CTIA’s ‘Race to 5G Summit’ in Washington DC. He talked about how 5G technology has the potential to radically change the way we live with its massive bandwidth, ultra-high speeds, and super-low latency – helping digitize our country and “make it feel like you have the cloud in your back pocket.”

As the leader in the race to make 5G a reality, Verizon is on track to be first to deploy 5G fixed broadband service and a 5G mobile solution in the U.S. Our first-mover advantage in testing 5G over millimeter wave spectrum with real customers in 11 markets last year exceeded our expectations for speed, latency, distance and propagation. And our efforts to form our 5G Tech Forum and create a pre-commercial 5G standard actually pushed the worldwide 5G ecosystem to accelerate its efforts to establish the industry-wide 3GPP standard in December 2017 – a full year ahead of expectations. We’ll launch our 5G residential broadband service in 3-5 markets later this year and take the same aggressive approach to the deployment of 5G mobility when devices become available.

None of this happens by accident.

Ed explained how the work we’ve done to densify our network with small cells, expand our fiber infrastructure, obtain millimeter wave spectrum, and work with our partners to advance our network technologies is laying the foundation for our 5G networks of tomorrow – and no one is farther along than we are.

When 5G is combined with mobile edge computing, it will be a game changer for customers and the technology space – creating a wide range of innovations, from AR/VR applications for consumers to industrial automation opportunities. And just as few people could envision apps like Uber, Snapchat and Instagram when we first brought 4G to the marketplace, Ed said everyone – operators and technology leaders – need to lean in and work together to build the next-generation networks now, so innovation can happen tomorrow. “5G will only be limited by our imagination,” Ed said.