5G has hit Broadway, but think of it as in previews. With Verizon and Sprint now both offering 5G service in New York City, I set out to chart how they're doing. I walked around several neighborhoods on Friday, Oct. 11, to see if Sprint's 5G offers an experience worthy of the name. I also made maps of Verizon's mysterious, unmapped 5G network.

I used a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G phone for Sprint and a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G for Verizon. I ran Ookla field test software, which ran a speed test every two minutes, along with a routine that captured the network indicator in the status bar every minute. I spot-checked the software and visual network indicators against the phone's service mode screen.

On all the images in this story, the orange dots are 5G; blue dots are 4G.

Verizon: Very Little Coverage

Verizon's millimeter-wave 5G approach offers spectacular speeds and capacity, often above 1Gbps, but not very much coverage since the cell sites only have 600- to 800-foot radiuses. Verizon first launched in April in Chicago and Minneapolis, and has since been filling in the downtown areas of both cities—as well as 10 others.

But the company's lack of coverage maps has been leading it to overpromise coverage by specifying broad neighborhoods where it hasn't fully built out. In New York, Verizon promises coverage in "parts" of "Midtown, Financial District, Harlem, East Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, and Washington Heights" in Manhattan, as well as neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In my testing, I found "parts" to mean as little as two blocks of a large neighborhood. If it can't cover full neighborhoods, it should specify exactly which blocks have service.

Verizon Networks in Harlem

In my walk around Harlem, I only found Verizon 5G on a five-block stretch of Eighth Avenue. In East Harlem, it was just at one spot at 116th Street and Park Avenue.

When I did get Verizon 5G coverage, though, speeds were amazing. In Harlem, I saw speeds of 1.2Gbps and 1.4Gbps.

Verizon Networks in Hell's Kitchen

In Hell's Kitchen, the only 5G sites seemed to be around the Javits Convention Center and at 42nd and 11th. These are big neighborhoods; the maps speak for themselves.

But again, speeds were amazing—up to 539Mbps outside the convention center. This is the promise and the problem of millimeter-wave 5G. You get amazing speeds, but only in small areas around cell sites, so you need a lot of sites. And in a city like New York, where real estate access is a constant drama, setting up that number of small cells will be very difficult. Here, 5G is not a technology problem, it's a real estate problem.

Verizon Networks in Downtown NYC

Verizon Networks in NYU Area

Verizon promises to double the number of 5G small cell sites in New York by the end of the year, but unless there's some sea change in either 5G technology or the site-approval process, it's going to take years to establish neighborhood-wide coverage.

This said, Verizon may do better elsewhere: specifically, college towns. Verizon's 5G network in Providence seems to capture more of the local college campuses than it does of any New York City neighborhood, possibly driven by easier access to cell sites from a smaller, more cooperative local bureaucracy and a smaller number of large property owners.

Sprint: Lagging on Speeds

Sprint has the opposite problem from Verizon—lots of 5G coverage that doesn't really mean much in terms of speed. Sprint publishes 5G maps, and our Sprint 5G phone showed a 5G indicator a lot of the time.

Sprint's 5G network uses mid-band spectrum, which has the same range as its existing 4G network, which is great. But Sprint isn't using very much mid-band spectrum for 5G—only 40-60MHz in most cities. While it has more than 100MHz of mid-band in most cities, it's currently splitting that between LTE and 5G, and often not even using all of the mid-band it has available. That means its 5G network seems slow.

Sprint Networks in Harlem

Sprint Networks in Midtown

Sprint Networks in Downtown NYC

Sprint Networks in NYU area

Take a look at the maps of where Verizon showed Speeds Over 100Mbps in Harlem, and where Sprint showed over 100Mbps. Sprint had much more 5G coverage, but Verizon had much more frequent high speeds.

Verizon Speeds Over 100Mbps in Harlem

Sprint Speeds Over 100Mbps in Harlem

Sprint's 5G did better than Verizon's 4G in Union Square, but honestly, not much better. Sprint topped out at 150Mbps in our Union Square tests—on 5G. On 4G, Verizon made it up to 128Mbps in the same area. Sprint showed somewhat more consistent tests over 100Mbps.

Verizon Speeds Over 100Mbps in NYU area

Sprint Speeds Over 100Mbps in NYU area

Verizon Speeds Over 100Mbps in Downtown NYC

Sprint Speeds Over 100Mbps in Downtown NYC

This is because "5G" isn't a magic panacea, something we are going to get gut-punched by next year when the carriers launch a probably-disappointing "nationwide 5G" on low-band spectrum.

The advantage of 5G comes not in airwave magic or rays, but in its ability to use wider channels than 4G does. If you don't have enough spectrum to take advantage of those wider channels—as Sprint by and large isn't doing, and as T-Mobile's 600MHz network won't have the ability to do—the improvements aren't going to be dramatic.

5G Disappointment Hits: Who Can Fix It?

Before I declare 5G a disaster, I want to remember a really unwise column I wrote about Android in 2009. Written in the dead period between the HTC G1 and the Motorola Droid, I lamented what looked like a lot of vaporware and failed promises, and said OEMs were much more focused on Windows Mobile.

That was absolutely true at the time, but I didn't take into account that we were watching a beta-testing period playing out in the consumer market. Once the Droid hit that November, Android was off and running.

We're seeing the same thing here. Driven by a marketing need to be "first," US wireless carriers publicly launched their 5G networks about a year too early. That doesn't condemn 5G as a technology—we're just getting marketing promises that are too ambitious for the current state of the networks.

The FCC also needs to take immediate action. Our biggest problem with 5G in the US right now is a lack of 5G-exclusive mid-band spectrum, which has both the width and the range to satisfy consumers' needs. The FCC must get aggressive on reclaiming and auctioning the C-Band, a set of frequencies currently used for free by private satellite companies.

Follow more developments on our Race to 5G page, which we'll keep updating.

Further Reading