Verizon executives this week batted down pointed criticism and ongoing concerns about its millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G strategy during an event with analysts and investors. Verizon’s 5G effort began with a heavy push on mmWave to deploy its 5G Ultra Wideband network, but the coverage of that network remains narrow and sporadic, sometimes from city block to city block. 

That high-band network is now live in 55 U.S. cities and Verizon said it’s still on track to push that coverage to 60 cities by the end of the year, a four-fold increase from where the operator was at the end of 2019. “We are on track to do five times more small cells on 5G Ultra Wideband this year compared to last year,” CEO Hans Vestberg said. 

“We have lofty goals to deploy our 5G millimeter wave and expand our footprint,” said Kyle Malady, EVP and CTO at Verizon. Those activities are aggressive, ongoing, and ramping up despite the COVID-19 crisis and other headwinds, he said. 

“The team has built a machine over the last 18 months that is allowing us to put out thousands of Ultra Wideband sites per month. In some cases, we’re putting on several hundred Ultra Wideband sites per day,” Malady said. 

Some analysts, including Walter Piecyk, an analyst at LightShed Partners, took Verizon executives to task for displaying charts with no numbers or y-axis. Piecyk was especially critical of Verizon’s charts indicating a short, temporary decline in network capacity when the COVID-19 crisis hit and another that showed a steady increase in monthly mmWave site activations but again without specific numbers. 

“Don’t you need to get to like tens of thousands of sites per month if you want millimeter-wave [spectrum] to give you the [Ultra Wideband] coverage that you need?” Piecyk asked. 

“I think the path that we’re on, the machine that we’ve built to pump these out and do thousands a month, is going to allow us to hit our game plan,” Malady said. 

“We’ve targeted areas obviously that have the most usage,” he said. “We’re not done with Ultra Wideband. We’re only at the beginning. There is a decade plus of this technology and we are just starting.”

The operator expects about 5% of total network usage to occur on mmWave spectrum in the near term, but that share of total traffic will continue to grow as more sites are deployed and more compatible devices hit the network, according to Malady. “If you look at the urban cohort, at some point in the not-so-distant future we’re going to start seeing upwards of 50% of usage on millimeter wave in that area,” he added.

Verizon’s network engineers are continuing to work toward deploying a 5G standalone core next year, and the operator is also looking ahead to new capabilities like network slicing and an expansion of its mobile edge compute footprint for enterprises.

“We believe pairing those two up and bringing those into the enterprise space … is going to be a game changer and change the way CIOs and people think about running their enterprises, whether it be a factory, whether it be a corporate campus, or whether it just be regular IT capabilities,” Malady said.

Verizon maintains that meaningful revenues from its mobile edge compute offering, which is now available in seven U.S. cities and expected to reach 10 cities by year end, will begin arriving in 2022. 

In the interim, the operator’s expanded use of carrier aggregation and CBRS spectrum allowed it to boost its network capacity and get the additional margin it needed to deploy dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), which allowed the operator to deploy 4G LTE and 5G on the same spectrum, according to Malady.

In DSS, “there’s a slight inefficiency in the control plane to allow 4G and 5G to work together in the same spectrum, and we knew that, we understood exactly what it was, we were adding a little more capacity anyway,” he said. 

Malady admitted that DSS introduces a “slight inefficiency in the control plane,” but he claimed that Verizon’s concerns about a degradation in performance due to the use of DSS has been abated. “We’re in the best shape we’ve been in terms of capacity overall in our network,” he said. 

“We don’t want anybody going backwards because they’re on the train for the future on 5G, so we’re extremely pleased with where we are right now with DSS performance. In many cases, it works better than 4G would, most of the time it’s on par, and every once and a while you get a little bit less,” Malady said.