Verizon today said it will unleash a trove of new mid-band spectrum on its 5G network later this month in a move to bolster that network's competitive position against rivals T-Mobile US and AT&T. The announcement followed intense back-and-forth missives with federal regulators that have delayed the move.

The operator originally committed to deploy 5G service on C-band spectrum reaching 100 million people by March 2022. Now, after two consecutive delays, Verizon is accelerating that plan and activating service in one fell swoop across a 60 megahertz swath of spectrum that was supposed to be cleared and available for use in early December 2021.

An agreement reached last night with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provided a “date certain by which we can actually activate service on C-band,” Adam Koeppe, Verizon’s SVP of network technology and planning, said in a phone interview.

“After many years of work between the Federal Communications Commission and government agencies preparing C-band, first for auction and then deployment, the FAA decided to raise a bunch of questions that were not really grounded in reality,” he said.

Potential 5G radio interference with altimeters, which measure how close an aircraft is to the ground, is the central concern, according to the FAA. AT&T, which is also party to the agreement and impacted by the same C-band delays, will likely begin activating 5G service on its mid-band spectrum holdings later this month — albeit at a slower pace initially than Verizon.

“There are no reported incidents of interference caused by C-band to radio altimeters in the 4.2-4.4 GHz range,” Koeppe said, reiterating a point the U.S. carriers and FCC have made consistently throughout the C-band debacle. 

“When we launch on the 19th, we’ll have at least [100 million people] covered so we’re significantly ahead of our prior commitment for the number of people that we’re going to cover,” he added. 

Verizon and AT&T also agreed to some mitigation measures, including larger exclusion zones around airports for six months. 

“The FAA and FCC can work together, and if there’s mitigations that have to occur on the FAA side with certain altimeters, they’ve got more time now to go figure that out and do what they have to do to comply with the use of their frequency bands,” Koeppe said. 

He credited Verizon’s engineering and network operations teams with doing all the necessary planning, permitting, coordination with tower companies and equipment vendors, and on-the-ground construction crews that put the operator in position to accelerate its initial footprint of mid-band 5G service. 

Testing occurred throughout the better part of 2021, and the next step will be almost as simple as flipping a switch, Koeppe explained. “You basically prep the network to a point where you allow service on that frequency range with software commands,” he explained. 

Verizon’s mid-band 5G network will initially run in non-standalone mode, which means it will continue to ride and rely on Verizon’s existing 4G LTE evolved packet core. “As we move throughout this year, you’ll start to see 5G core come up,” Koeppe said. 

The operator previously said 5G network traffic would start hitting its 5G core in 2020, and pledged full commercialization of the 5G standalone core in 2021. The operator hit the former in 2021, but the latter won’t occur until later this year. 

Verizon will migrate some 5G network functions into the standalone 5G architecture throughout 2022, Koeppe added. The operator also plans to expand the footprint of its mid-band 5G network around the end of 2023 when it’s scheduled to gain access to between 140 megahertz and 200 megahertz of C-band spectrum around most of the country.

Verizon is also growing the footprint of its fixed wireless access network as part of the C-band deployment, with that service offering to soon include variants running on 4G LTE, millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G, and 5G running on C-band spectrum. 

“Basically every node that’s deployed for C-band will be capable of supporting 5G Home,” Koeppe said. “We’re putting one network in the ground that supports both the mobility case and the fixed wireless case. That significantly expands the fixed wireless access opportunity that we have."