At its quarterly earnings call today, Verizon announced plans to expand its C-band 5G coverage to more rural and suburban areas by the end of this year.
While it’s unclear which specific markets should expect to see a C-Band upgrade, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg noted that C-Band 5G coverage has so far been expanded to 70 of the 406 available markets. That leaves 330 still waiting, and some of them will surely get lucky before 2024 rolls around.
Unfortunately, Vestberg didn’t clarify how many of the 330 unserved markets will receive C-band coverage this year, but he did at least confirm that most of the upcoming rollouts will focus on suburban and rural areas.
Verizon spent $45.4 billion acquiring C-band spectrum licenses at an FCC auction in 2021 and obtained between 140 and 200 MHz of spectrum in all 406 U.S. markets. This is definitely a big chunk of spectrum, and since then the carrier has slowly but steadily extended access to it, but it definitely wasn’t a lightning-fast deployment as most of the licensed spectrum was already in use and requires clearing first reallocation.
When all is said and done, Verizon will be able to serve more than 250 million people with C-band spectrum, which is pretty impressive. However, the conclusion of the rollout may require waiting until 2024 and beyond.
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