Verizon has actually deployed mmWave 5G fairly widely.

Sprint deployed WiMAX (remember that?) fairly widely, lot of good that did them.

mmWave is as dead as dead. The cellular Betamax. iPhone 16e (the everyman's iPhone) doesn't support it, and neither did the SE before it.

VZW will be converting those base stations into birdhouses in 5-7 years.

That's sad for Apple, then. A poor decision on their part.

Examples of Android phones that often support mmWave 5G:

Samsung: Many Galaxy S and Z series models, including recent releases.

Google: Pixel phones, especially the Pro models.

OnePlus: Various 5G phones, including the 10 Pro, 10T, and Nord series.

(etc)

Apple should get their shit together.

It never worked unless you were walking on the street. Expensive too, I heard $20 per antenna. Millimeter is good for fixed antenna and delivering internet last mile to homes. Verizon bought into it millimeter while TMobile focused on mid bands, why T-Mobile is faster on average than Verizon. People use their phones indoors.

Absolutely correct on all the above.

T-Mobile is also using mmwave and retaining it in urban cores, but returning a lot of the spectrum.

There's a LOT of spectrum work being done at the FCC right now... Or was...

> OnePlus: Various 5G phones, including the 10 Pro, 10T, and Nord series.

The 9 pro was the last model they sold with mmwave. The entire 10 and 11 series don't have it. The Nord never did.

> Apple should get their shit together.

They ship mmwave on everything but their budget models?

Those Samsungs lack mmWave antennas in Europe. Not sure about Apple.

mmWave is going to be useful in places like stadiums or large arenas, though. It works wonders in these kinds of applications.

WiMAX never really worked well at all.

Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense. For the other 99.99% of usage, it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work. mmWave 5G is mostly a sunk cost for Verizon, and largely irrelevant to everyone else.

Stadiums, downtown areas, school sports, racetracks, etc.

Any place outside, in good weather, with high population density!

> Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense.

And Airports, and Parks, and Ampitheateaters, and Malls, and Theme Parks...

mmWave isn't a general solution, sure. But mmWave is great for anywhere crowded enough to benefit from a DAS setup, and there are a lot of DAS setups around.

In any case it was a much better solution than band 46 license assisted access LTE-A/NR-U which used unlicensed 5Ghz spectrum shared with wifi. If we want to talk about vaporware/abandoned stuff, this was among the most controversial and least deployed solutions to those areas before mmwave became a thing.

Agreed. Stealing public WiFi spectrum for private LTE was always a terrible idea.

>it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work

Yes, it requires more power.

You have to consider power and the time the radio needs to be on to accomplish the task.

If using mmWave you can transfer data at 2,000Mbps and using midband you achieve 500Mbps the baseband will be on for 4x the time with midband, and it will need to use less than 1/4th the power of mmWave to break even.

Midband does not require 1/4th the power of mmWave. Closer to 1/2th.

On 11/27/22 at 5:13pm I was in the St. Louis airport and ran a speed test on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I was probably one of the first non-diagnostic users of their mmWave infrastructure and I must have been the only user at the time because I achieved a damn-near-practical-maximum of 3938Mbps down. The only reason I ran the speed test at all was that a notoriously sluggish web application I was using was performing spectacularly.

Since then I have been running speed tests at concerts, sporting events, traffic jams, airports, shopping centers, and the Rennaissance Faire. All locations where, prior to 5G, cellular coverage was useless.

On 10/13/24 at 1:14pm I was in a crowded terminal at Chicago O'Hare and ran a speed test on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Connected via mmWave I achieved 1869Mbps down.

> WiMAX never really worked well at all

Neither did LTE (or VoLTE) work well at the start.

WiMAX didn't get the funding and backing primarily because it didn't integrate well with existing systems. Hilariously it fit the criteria as 4G before LTE did. I guess there was a strong vendor push to include LTE into 4G.

I had one of the few laptop models with WiMAX built-in, and I tried it several times. The only time it worked was on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, surprising me completely. But even then, the connection speed was lower than of my 3G USB modem.

If mmWave is dead as dead, why are Ofcom going ahead with their spectrum auction? https://www.mobileworldlive.com/europe/ofcom-moves-ahead-wit...

Nokia is also currently rolling out Europe’s first 5G standalone mmWave Radio Access Network in Italy. More to the point though, it could be integral in how we deal with NTN - particularly LEO D2C provisioning

https://filtronic.com/news-events/white-papers/time-to-step-...

https://mmtron.com/mmwave-leo-satellites-coming-over-the-hor...

"Cellular Betamax" would suggest someone knowingly used it, and a handful of people actually liked it and committed to it.

They did - it was an atypically awful engineering decision that caused them to bungle their 5G rollout and cede market share to TMobile.

It only makes sense as a cable tv displacement that’s easier to deploy (and cuts out their unions) in cities. But to my knowledge, they haven’t done that. They dtoppef hundreds of poles in my city that aren’t even active.

> mmWave is phone vaporware

Is it? I've definitely seen "5G UW" show up on my 15 Pro Max in the bay area. Att and Verizon are slowly expanding mmWave

Get a non-US iPhone which doesn't support those: https://www.apple.com/iphone/cellular/

I like getting gbps on my phone. Everything syncs quickly including 4k60 videos

I regularly see it in Atlanta in the big tech business areas (Buckhead, Midtown, etc) but it is hilariously bad.

Whenever I notice my cellular data has regressed to 3G speeds and reliability, I look up at the network status and see “5G UW”.

I don’t know if they deployed it without enough bandwidth on the trunk to handle all of the users or something else but I generally have to toggle airplane mode to drop back into 5G or LTE to get off of it.

Ditto, I’ve disabled 5G entirely because it performs worse in high density areas compared to LTE.

"5G UW" is marketing bullshit by Verizon that they force cellphone makers to display. Basically it originally meant "mmWave" but was later revised to "mmWave or mid-band". You are probably seeing the mid-band due to the limitations of mmWave.

"5G UW" is good service, but it's not usually mmWave. It's primarily mid-band stuff, usually Band n77 (3.7ghz C-Band)

It's usually good, but that's primarily because Verizon is going a good-ish job (in Michigan, at least) of deploying it densely in smaller neighborhood/urban cell sites (2x to 3x site density over traditional PCS-spaced cell towers). It's basically Verizon's version of what Clear was supposed to be doing with WiMax.

Notably, C-Band is not mmWave. mmWave bands start at like the 24.2ghz+, way way higher up the spectrum band.

If your phone reads "5G UW", there's like a 95% chance you aren't on mmWave, you are on n77 / C-Band / 'mid-band'.

What about convention centers, subway platforms, and other places where you have a lot of people packed together outside the reach of exterior towers? They stick microcells on the ceilings of these — wouldn't it make sense for those to be mmWave?

Not really, because many cheaper phones don't have mmWave antennas. Nor do some international iPhones.

Aside from that, mmWave's biggest application is high-speed connections, not necessarily large client capacity per cell (although there is correlation). For subways I'd probably want the lowest band 4G or 5G cells for maximum penetration.

Convention centers are not really a good application for micro cells, as you have ample time to do a professional WiFi setup. Something like 5000 people should be serviceable by a 10Gb/s backhaul.

I could see stadiums being a good application for mmWave. Scant few foreigners visit American sports games, media wants/needs lot of backhaul, peaks of 30 000 visitors is definitely very hard to manage with WiFi.

mmWave in American cities is a horrible application though. Americans love building vertically, which greatly hampers mmWave viability.