Verizon's 5G Home service will be great—when you can get it. But even in its four launch cities, the carrier's coverage area is quite limited, and we now won't see it expand for at least six months.

In Verizon's earnings call this week, CEO Hans Vestberg said its initial 5G hardware was "fully deployed in the four cities we have decided." But as you can see from the maps below, "fully deployed" means it only covers a fraction of each city.

The underlying struggle here is that Verizon did its initial rollout with early "5GTF" 5G equipment. Now that standards-compliant 5G NR infrastructure is available, it's switching further builds over to the global standard. But the standards-compliant home routers from Samsung and Motorola won't be available until the second half of this year, so Verizon can't expand its 5G Home coverage area until it can get hold of those.

Back in October, Verizon's chief network officer Nicki Palmer told me that the company's goal was to make its home and mobile 5G networks "the same network." That means where Verizon offers mobile 5G coverage, it intends to offer home 5G coverage as well. As late 2019 becomes 2020, that hopefully means we'll see dramatic expansions of where you'll be able to get a new high-speed home internet offering.

Americans want and need the choice that Verizon 5G Home is going to offer. Home ISP competition in the US is absolutely terrible, and Verizon said in December that it's promising to soon double 5G Home's speeds. Those speeds currently average 300Mbps, according to the company.

Verizon doesn't offer coverage maps of its 5G service, but it does offer neighborhood lists. I took those neighborhood lists, translated them to neighborhood boundaries via Google Maps, mapped those to ZIP codes, and I'm giving you a map of the ZIP codes. My maps somewhat overstate Verizon's coverage. So where will Verizon offer 5G Home for the next six months?

Houston 5G Home Coverage Map

In the Houston area, 5G Home is available "in the loop" and parts of the Near Northside, Montrose, Midtown, and University neighborhoods, and The Heights. That is not very much of Houston, and when I checked several addresses downtown, Verizon's website said service was not available. But here you get the rough geographic area.

Indianapolis 5G Home Coverage Map

In Indianapolis, 5G Home is available in the Eastside corridor from downtown to the Little Flower neighborhood, and parts of Speedway, Lawrence, Hamilton County, and Johnson County.

For this map, I am excluding "parts of Hamilton and Johnson Counties" because, come on, Verizon, which parts?

Los Angeles 5G Home Coverage Map

In the LA area, 5G Home is available in parts of downtown, Chinatown and near the USC campus. LA is also very big, and that is not much of LA.

Sacramento 5G Home Coverage Map

In Sacramento, 5G Home is available in parts of downtown, Metro Center, East Sacramento, North and South Natomas, North Oak Park, North City, and South City Farms.

My map here really overstates coverage because North City Farms and South City Farms are relatively small neighborhoods that don't take up entire ZIP codes, near the bottom of the map.

If anyone can tell me how to combine ZIP polygons with custom lat-lon polygons for filled maps in Tableau, please ping me in the comments. I'm just learning, and when I tried to do the custom polygon using a point order, it didn't turn out as a rectangle.

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