Samsung Shows Off Latest Verizon 5G Home Modems

BARCELONA—Sacramento, this is your 5G modem.

At Mobile World Congress hither today, Samsung Networks showed off what may be the concluding version of Verizon's home 5G equipment. The company's gigabit home Cyberspace service will debut in Sacramento later this year; Verizon has promised a fixed-wireless 5G service for homes in "3 to five cities" in 2022.

MWC Bug Art Last year, we saw an early form of the 5G home equipment (and in fact gave it a Best of MWC award), but it's changed a lot in the past twelvemonth. Formerly a big black slab that looked like a cable box, information technology has now become a vertically oriented white box nearly the size of a hardback book, with an Ethernet port on the back. Information technology sits in your window, receives a 5G signal, and and so distributes it as Wi-Fi in your habitation.

Running in Samsung's berth, the white "consumer premise equipment" (CPE) was quiet, only hot. The only condition indicators on the device are four light-green LEDs recessed into the area where the ports get.

Samsung also showed off the 5G millimeter moving ridge prison cell site that will serve Verizon'due south 5G neighborhood, and the external modem unit of measurement that will serve homes where Verizon'southward millimeter-wave spectrum can't make it into the windows.

All of the system'southward components are, thankfully, a lot smaller and less obtrusive than we expected. 5G cell sites volition be able to sit in "shrouds" on light poles, and are about the size of a backpack. That's of import, because they'll have to be placed every 500 to 1,000 feet as the fast, millimeter-wave indicate doesn't have much range. The external, weatherproofed antenna unit for the outside of a house is more similar the size of a coffee table book. It's all a heck of a lot less imposing than a satellite dish.

The initial indoor 5G/Wi-Fi Samsung router looks a little like Samsung Connect, its combo SmartThings hub and mesh router, but it won't accept those extra features initially, said Alok Shah, Samsung VP of networks strategy. Samsung is looking to put SmartThings and mesh direct into the 5G router in the future, he said.

Along with the Verizon home equipment, Samsung showed off various 5G uses based on its small, new millimeter-wave 5G units. One of them was a smart urban center approach where the urban center is covered in cameras detecting auto crashes, illegal U-turns, and even jaywalking, automatically summoning law enforcement or emergency services. That'south too farthermost a surveillance order for the United states of america, Shah said, but nosotros agreed that Singapore might be interested. And American cities could accept a lower-key approach, like using it to discover traffic accidents.

Millimeter-wave spectrum tin can be blocked by trees and hills, but Andrea Cardini, Verizon's VP of field network, east said the whole leaf problem is a little overblown. "For the fixed network, we're finding how information technology propagates is much better than what we thought information technology would be," she said.

But it sounded like that doesn't mean Verizon is going to serve every neighborhood in its 5G cities initially. "We're launching in specific areas based on the marketing and what marketing has asked for," she said.