Verizon this week put the early snafus surrounding C-band spectrum in the rear view with a pledge to spur mid-band 5G deployments at a pace that will allow it to reach 175 million people by the end of this year. 

That’s an “acceleration from what we originally thought would take to year-end 2023,” Bill Stone, Verizon’s VP of technology planning and development, said in a phone interview. The operator also held firm to its previous commitment to cover 250 million people with mid-band 5G service by the end of 2024.

Multiple factors, including a well-managed supply chain for equipment and third-party installers, the necessary capex, and per-site coverage hitting expectations with massive MIMO radios gave Verizon the confidence to hasten the deployment timeline, according to Stone. 

“The vast majority of the 175 million points of presence covered is going to be coming from macro sites,” he said. “We’ve already got a really good, well designed existing grid of macro sites” that currently cover more than 300 million people with low-band 5G, concurrent with 4G LTE service.

The coverage and performance of Verizon’s mid-band 5G radios on C-band spectrum is also “exceeding the expectations of many,” Stone said, underlining the opportunity Verizon is taking to increase its deployment activity this year.

“Small cells will play a part. They’ve really not played a part up til now. About the middle of this year, the small cell product for C-band will come available, and we will absolutely be deploying small cells for C-band as well,” he added. 

The operator also this week, during its Investor Day 2022 event, reiterated plans to commercialize and start moving customers to its 5G core around the middle of this year. Verizon previously pledged full commercialization of its 5G core in 2021, but it missed that deadline and pushed back to 2022.

However, wireless customers won’t gain access to standalone (SA) mode on the 5G core until 2023, Stone said. “We’ll be moving customers onto the 5G core before that. They will remain non-standalone, meaning they’ll still have the 4G anchor” until SA capability is made available to mobile customers in 2023, he added.

“We’re initially going to be mostly focused on non-standalone when we begin bringing customers on to the core around the middle of this year,” Stone said. Access to the SA mode will hit different segments of customers at different times, starting with fixed wireless access in mid-2022, he explained.

Once Verizon has 5G SA capability, it will also start to introduce network slicing, which unlocks multiple features including different levels of customized service for enterprise applications, according to Stone. “There are a number of different ways that the customization of service capabilities with 5G SA could come into play with the private network solutions” as well, he added.

“It’s also a gateway to mobile edge compute (MEC). We see private networks as the first step, and then very close after that the low-latency capabilities that you get with MEC will fit very nicely with that as well,” Stone explained.

Verizon Business this week also announced a turnkey private networking offer with Celona in a bid to broaden its On Site LTE and 5G service. The operator plans to make Celona’s LAN equipment available for private networks in multiple configurations for a private core on-premises, or in a public or private cloud.

Finally, Verizon said it’s increasingly adding more cell sites to its fiber network, jumping from 36% of all cell sites in 2020 to 45% in 2021. This results in cost efficiency due to owners' economics, and a boost in service level reliability because Verizon operates and maintains the transport layer directly, Stone explained.

Verizon said at least 50% of its cell sites will be connected to its fiber assets by the end of this year.