Verizon is launching 5G service on April 11 in Chicago and Minneapolis, with the Motorola 5G Moto Mod (pictured) as its initial device. The Moto Mod will be followed by the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, the first integrated 5G phone, although Verizon hasn't announced a hard date for the Galaxy launch.

The Moto Mod will be the first mobile 5G device that regular Americans can actually buy. Until now, Verizon has offered limited 5G home internet in four cities and AT&T has offered 5G hotspots in 12 cities by invitation only.

As with Verizon's "5GTF" home internet system, coverage will initially be very limited. Verizon's high-speed, millimeter-wave system has relatively short range, especially in dense areas. While the company has said it's able to get up to 3,000 feet from a tower in low-slung, suburban Houston, the tall buildings and canyons of downtown Chicago are an entirely different challenge.

Verizon's 5G home internet system and its mobile 5G system aren't initially compatible, but the company is in the middle of switching over the older markets to the newer system.

On the Google map below, zoom in on Chicago and Minneapolis to see our estimates of coverage. The red boxes are Verizon coverage. This map combines the landmarks in Verizon's FAQ with its description of neighborhood names, so it's approximate. The yellow box in Chicago is from a Sprint presentation at Mobile World Congress, the area where Sprint says it will have the best 5G coverage when they launch in May.

Sprint will be able to achieve broader coverage because it's using a lower frequency. Sprint is installing 5G on its existing 2.5GHz cellular spectrum, which has much longer range than millimeter wave, but at the cost of some speed; Sprint says it will be able to get a few hundred megabits a second, as opposed to Verizon's goal of a gigabit or more.

In Minneapolis, there's even less initial coverage. It's just downtown, along with an indoor-only cell site in the Verizon store at Mall of America.

Gotta Start Somewhere

These launches are very soft, to say the best of them. From what I hear, both Verizon and AT&T are still struggling with early base station firmware that limits speed, devices per sector, and channel usage. Verizon wants to hit 1Gbps with its millimeter-wave rollout, but I've been hearing that speeds on the AT&T millimeter-wave hotspot are more like 100Mbps, lower than existing 4G setups.

In Chicago, for instance, last year we showed that AT&T's 4G LAA rollout in certain parts of downtown was already hitting 537Mbps. I don't think we're going to see that kind of initial performance with 5G.

Don't draw any long-term conclusions based on that, though. AT&T and Verizon are moving very fast, and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray told me there are new base station firmware releases coming every few weeks.

There's a certain point beyond which you just have to let technology out in public to finish debugging it, and I think Verizon's there. That's why the company is offering the first three months of service for free. It will charge an additional $10/month for 5G service after that, so it better have differentiated service by July.

We'll be heading out to Verizon's 5G cities more than once over the next few months to track its progress.

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