Verizon is getting a jump on 5G with the biggest announcement yet. The company's 5G home internet service will come to 11 cities by mid-2017: Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Bernardsville (NJ), Brockton (MA), Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Sacramento, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

This isn't official 5G, and it won't be in phones. The real 5G standard, known as 5G NR, won't be set until September 2018. But there are a lot of stepping stones to a 5G world, and one of those appears to be pre-5G, gigabit home internet, which Verizon and AT&T have said they're launching this year.

There's a business reason for this, too, of course. Verizon mostly ended its Fios home internet rollout in 2010, but companies like that want to offer a "quadruple play"—wireless, home phone, home internet, and TV. In most places, Verizon lacks home internet and TV service; AT&T has TV (as DirecTV) but no home internet. These pre-5G rollouts let Verizon and AT&T start trying to steal customers from the monopoly cable companies that dominate home internet and TV service.

Verizon's early 5G home design will probably involve an antenna you stick out a window, which links with a device inside your home to provide Wi-Fi coverage. Scientists are still working out how to best provide indoor coverage on the very high frequencies, known as "millimeter wave," which Verizon and AT&T plan to use for 5G service. Those high frequencies have a lot of trouble penetrating walls.

"The 5G systems we are deploying will soon provide wireless broadband service to homes, enabling customers to experience cost-competitive, gigabit speeds that were previously only deliverable via fiber," Woojune Kim, vice president of Samsung's Next Generation Business Team, said in Verizon's press release.

The company is also making a bet that its 5G technology will dovetail with the eventual 5G standard. To improve its chances, it's working with Ericsson, Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung, as well as wireless operators in Japan, Korea, and Canada.

There's a slight danger here, in that those countries and Verizon also supported CDMA2000, a technology that was more advanced than its competitor GSM at the start but got left behind as standards pushed forward a decade later.

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But Qualcomm and Verizon have both assured me they'll be standards-friendly, and starting with fixed rather than mobile wireless makes the modems easier to replace if technology veers in a new direction with the final 5G spec in 2018.

Verizon hasn't given exact dates or locations for its rollouts, or talked about prices yet. But if Google Fiber can be used as a template, you shouldn't expect ultra-low broadband prices, just more bang for your buck. Google Fiber offers 100Mbps in Kansas City for $50 and 1Gbps for $70, for instance. Compare that to my block in New York, where Spectrum Cable is a monopoly; we get 100Mbps down for $59.99, 120Mbps for $119.99, and nothing faster.

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