Major US carrier Verizon has created its very own 5G incubation lab, complete with a set of initial partners, in the heart of New York’s Silicon Alley. The lab is not just a place for Verizon to work with partners on expanding 5G, but for innovators to learn to work with and use 5G before it’s even deployed, and to expand themselves through working with Verizon to become pioneers in 5G innovation. The entire venture was made possible by Verizon working with Alley, a startup incubator that specializes in rallying startups around similar goals, then hooking them up with investors and bigger partners.
The full list of partners who will be working with Verizon on getting new networking use cases ready for when 5G drops consists entirely of entities looking to make use of 5G’s unique properties like low latency and extremely high speed to make unconventional or previously unseen use cases a reality. Holojam is one example of a company that’s working on something unprecedented; the company wants to create social augmented reality advertisements. Notably, the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces lab at Columbia University has also signed onto the incubator program. These companies will all be leveraging Verizon’s pre-commercial 5G network in the development of their chosen products, and will have help from Verizon when it comes time to begin deploying those products to the public.
The pre-commercial Verizon 5G network that’s planned to power all of these innovations is shaping up to be capable indeed, despite criticism aimed at Verizon that the company is acting too quickly and will find its deployment lackluster compared to those of its peers once the final 3GPP standard for 5G is revealed. The carrier has gone far beyond the gigabit barrier in network testing. Verizon has also chosen to look to fixed wireless and small cells for the bulk of its future 5G deployment, two technologies seeing the same use all around the worldwide wireless industry. The final version of the 3GPP’s 5G standard is set to come out in 2020, but with commercial deployment already in its infancy, it looks like Verizon will have its own version of 5G up and running long before that time.