Verizon got a major boost from Apple this week with the CEOs of both companies sharing the virtual stage at Apple’s hotly anticipated 5G iPhone event to announce “nationwide” coverage on Verizon’s 5G network. 

Verizon was the only mobile operator featured in the pre-recorded presentation, earning both implied and implicit praise from Apple for its burgeoning 5G Ultra Wideband network running on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum.

“5G just got real,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said, doing his best to deliver a cameo deserving of Apple’s most important annual event. His time on stage was early and prominent.

Verizon’s marquee 5G network, albeit limited in availability, is now intertwined with the speeds, features, and experience that Apple would expect on its late-to-market and first series of iPhones compatible with 5G networks. 

The carrier bet early and wholeheartedly on mmWave spectrum, opting to effectively hold out on delivering a nationwide 5G network running on its low-band spectrum until there was an iPhone that could make use of it. During that interim, T-Mobile US has enjoyed 10 months of bragging rights as the first U.S. carrier to deploy 5G across much of the country. AT&T leaped over the nationwide 5G hurdle less than two months ago.

Verizon 5G network running on mmWave spectrum gets knocked for its scant coverage, but it delivers average speeds ranked among the best in the world, and the fastest in the U.S.

In tandem with Apple’s latest iPhone release, Verizon expanded its Ultra Wideband network to now reach parts of 55 cities, 43 stadiums and arenas, and seven airports. “Our 5G network now gives you double the peak download speeds, over 4 Gb/s today in ideal conditions,” Vestberg said. The carrier also claims download speeds up to 250 Mb/s, again, in ideal conditions.

The more meaningful development, but driven less by top-notch 5G performance, is Verizon’s freshly available 5G network running on low-band spectrum concurrently used by its 4G LTE network. “Verizon is turning on our 5G nationwide network, reaching more than 200 million people across more 1,800 cities and towns,” Vestberg said during the event.

This is the 5G network most of Verizon’s customers will experience for the foreseeable future. Verizon has consistently differentiated its two distinct flavors of 5G by branding its mmWave effort as 5G Ultra Wideband, and setting expectations for that and its new low-band 5G service accordingly. 

“In the near term, there is clearly a difference in performance and capability between 5G Ultra Wideband and 5G nationwide,” Bill Stone, VP of technology development and planning at Verizon, told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “But we're going to continue to push and drive innovation, and there will absolutely be improvement in both cases.”

Describing 5G as “still a relatively young technology,” Stone said Verizon will continue to innovate and improve across its full range of 5G. “What you see today is not what you’re going to see in the future,” he said.

It’s unclear if Verizon’s long-range plan is to eventually blend it all together or position its pair of 5G networks as unique offerings. “It’s premature for me to say whether or not that all comes together at some point in the future,” Stone said. “But we're certainly going to be improving both the 5G nationwide network in terms of expanding coverage [and] improving performance” with engineering techniques and other measures he declined to elaborate on. 

For now, Verizon’s 5G story is halved and the experience of its customers with the latest iPhones will be determined by how close they are to a mmWave radio.