WAILEA, Hawaii—With Verizon grabbing headlines yesterday about being the first with a 5G Samsung Galaxy S10, Sprint's VP of product engineering and development, Ryan Sullivan, showed up at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit to argue that we shouldn't read too much into the Verizon-Samsung pairing.

"We're one of Samsung's biggest customers. You better believe we're working with them as well," Sullivan said.

Along with an already-announced LG phone and this Samsung partnership, Sprint pointed out that its upcoming HTC "hub" hotspot will be just fine for home internet access, making it potentially a more mobile competitor to Verizon's home 5G service.

In 2019, 5G will only be on a few key, innovative devices, though, he said. "Nobody is going to come out in 2019 with a 10- to 15-device portfolio for 5G. You're going to see 5G less on global flagship products, and more one-off development efforts," he said.

Sprint, which has said it's bringing 5G to nine cities in the first half of 2019, has a big buildout advantage compared to AT&T and Verizon. While AT&T and Verizon are building brand-new networks based on millimeter-wave technology, Sprint is just converting existing 2.5GHz 4G towers to 5G on the same radio bands. That will let Sprint cover broader areas of cities more quickly. "In LA, Sprint will offer mobile 5G service all the way from Dodgers Stadium to Santa Monica," the company has said.

Bringing 5G Home, and to Work

While Sprint doesn't intend to battle Verizon on "fixed" internet access, Sprint's upcoming HTC-made hotspot will be good enough for many people to use as their home internet connection, Sullivan said, blurring the line between mobile and fixed access.

"You'll start to see us dip our toe into the water in home internet access with the products that we announce in 2019," Sullivan said. The hub will be good enough to serve "small households, apartment dwellers, even small businesses" for primary access, he said.

5G service plans won't have the same deprioritization thresholds on current unlimited 4G plans, the sorts of soft caps that prevent people from using their phones as hotspots at home.

"It does actually relax the threshold," Sullivan said. "Some of the things you need to do in a constrained LTE market you don't have to do in a 5G market."

The new technology will open up new business uses as well. Qualcomm plans to talk a lot about augmented and virtual reality this week, something Sullivan thinks is "100 percent … going to take off." But that won't be about VR games. Business uses like "virtual retail shopping, remote diagnostics and virtual tours" will help drive AR and VR into the work world, he said.

"5G is absolutely going to create a new frontier of use cases and ecosystems," he said.

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