C-band’s here. No airplanes have fallen out of the sky.
Verizon launched its C-band network in 46 cities this week and AT&T launched in eight. Neither of them have a coverage map yet because of last-minute arguments over airport exclusion zones, but Verizon says its map is coming soon.
The whole apocalyptic airline industry argument over C-band turned out to be as overblown as I thought it would. Yes, some older radio altimeters may pick up signals way out of their band (and the current C-band networks are 400MHz away, so we’re talking way out of their band), but modern commercial aircraft by and large use altimeters with band filters that can stay in their lane.
By Thursday afternoon, the FAA had certified nearly 80% of commercial airplanes as safe to operate with C-band, and the president of American Airlines was saying that this whole thing wouldn’t result in noticeable disruptions to air traffic.
Here’s the rub: If the FAA certified the altimeters now, it could very well have done the same thing back in December—or even a year ago, when the spectrum was auctioned! But instead, the agency and the air industry interests it serves wanted to play this ridiculous brinksmanship game and freak everyone out for what turned out to be no reason.
I can’t help but sign on to analyst Anshel Sag’s conspiracy theory that this was all about the airlines trying to get Verizon to pay for new altimeters; if that’s the case, they aren’t getting what they wanted, and instead everyone stressed themselves out over nothing.
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OK, now to the test results. We’re using a very cool app called Wind from our cousins at Ookla; it uses specially altered Samsung Galaxy S21+ phones to provide very low-level modem data, slicing things down to even showing how fast each component channel in your connection is. It’s great, and you’ll see more from it in the future. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company.)
In my day-one tests of Verizon’s C-band network, I got results much slower than most other people did. I’m 99% sure that’s because the two cell sites I found were just slow sites. But I hiked all over Queens, NY, to find those two cell sites; it’s just the luck of the draw. I’m heading out again as you read this, and will update my test results as I see more data.
I’m more encouraged by the results I saw on range, to the tune of about a 0.37-mile radius for the sites. That’s limited not just by frequency, but by the nearness of neighboring sites as well. That distance is very close to what I’ve seen from T-Mobile’s mid-band network, and it’s therefore something you can actually build a metro network on. (Yes, there is always going to be someone in the comments who is like, “well, nothing for rural here,” and yes, there is nothing for rural here.)
I don’t have any AT&T C-band results yet—we’ll get those in Chicago next week—and I’m also planning to look at T-Mobile’s NR carrier aggregation soon. There’s lots of stuff coming, so keep an eye for it all on my author page at PCMag.com.
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