By Alan Friedman
Remember when Verizon and AT&T spent over $68 billion during an FCC auction last year of C-band licenses? These licenses covered mid-band frequencies in the range of 3.7GHz-3.98GHz giving the two carriers the ability to fight back against T-Mobile. The latter picked up 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum when it purchased Sprint for $26 billion and it was helping T-Mobile become arguably the early 5G leader in the U.S.
While mid-band signals don't travel as far as low-band signals do, they travel farther than mmWave. And while mid-band 5G signals aren't as fast as mmW, they are 10 times faster than low-band 5G. So while the odds of you finding a mmWave 5G signal running at 1Gbps is prohibitive, you are much more likely to come across a mid-band signal delivering data at 400Mbps.