Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amid an ongoing tussle with the FAA and airline industry, Verizon today flipped the switch on its mid-band 5G deployment, which uses spectrum that the company spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire in the C-band auction. The new, faster level of 5G connectivity will significantly augment Verizon’s “5G Ultra Wideband” network, which, until now, has relied solely on extremely-fast-but-very-hard-to-find millimeter wave spectrum.
Mid-band 5G overcomes many of the hurdles that have made mmW the brunt of jokes from competitors like T-Mobile: it’s actually available indoors, and coverage doesn’t vary as unpredictably from one street to the next. Customers with compatible phones should experience noticeably faster data speeds compared to…