The White House recently declared the rollout of nationwide 5G wireless service a national security priority. It’s not like it had to convince the country’s major carriers to pay attention to this technology as they’ve already been working on it. Verizon previously confirmed that its 5G network will go live in five cities next month. Sprint has now said that it’s going to offer 5G service and devices in the United States by 2019.
Sprint has said that its priority is mobile 5G and that it’s working with Qualcomm and parent company SoftBank to develop technologies that will aid in wide-scale 5G deployment. It’s planning to provide commercial 5G services and compatible devices in late 2019.
It’s possibly going to be a slow rollout and it’s too early to predict which cities will be the first to receive Sprint’s 5G network. It goes without saying that it’s going to take a considerable amount of time before any major carrier can launch a nationwide 5G network.
Verizon will get the ball rolling on its 5G efforts starting next year. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to the network and how quickly Verizon is able to scale up the network to additional cities across the United States.