“It’s a great day for us to be first in the world with 5G smartphones and turning on the network,” says Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. “We decided to turn it on today (8 days early). We are selling the Moto 5G phone. The z3 is in the stores. You can have a fantastic experience with the Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network in these two cities (Minneapolis, Chicago areas) right now.”

Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, announces the launch of 5G in two cities and the availability of the Moto 5G phone in an interview on CNBC:

Verizon is First in the World to Turn on 5G

The team has been working relentlessly to give our customers this fantastic experience in 5G and actually our test is going so well. Why wait when we have some good news for our customers. So we decided to turn it on today (8 days early). We are selling the Moto 5G phone. The z3 is in the stores. You can have a fantastic experience with the Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network in these two cities (Minneapolis, Chicago areas) right now.

You’re going to see many more handsets with 5G coming out this year. We have announced two that we will have in the first half of the year. The Motorola, of course, is the one we are going with right now and we’re going to have a Samsung a little bit later in this quarter. That’s the two and then we have others coming in the second half. We’re going to see more 5G phones than probably were expected. We have at least a good relationship with all of those guys.

5G Rolling Out in Minneapolis and Chicago

When it comes to our rollout we are starting with these two cities right now. We’re going to do more than 30 markets this year and we’re working in all these markets right now. We’re going to turn them up as soon as they’re ready. Then we feel that we can give the experience that we want to give to our customers when it comes to 5G, meaning real 5G, and at the same time have the most reliable 4G network.

We think a lot about our customers and how we’re going to treat them. It’s a great day for us to be first in the world with 5G smartphones and turning on the network. I think that says a lot about the team that I have around me and the partners we have. We’re going to do a lot about education around it. Our stores have been trained now to explain what see you can do with it and, of course, we also talked about the ultra-wideband.

You’re Going to See So Much Innovation With 5G

We’re going to have speeds up to 1 gigabit per second compared to around of 50 megabits per second in 4G. It’s 20 times faster when you’re in the 5G zone. Of course, you can do so much with it at the same time. You’re going to have download speeds up to 300 megabits per second which means that it can take down things much quicker. The latencies will be some 30 milliseconds compared to 100 today.

And that’s just a start of 5G. What we saw in 4G was enormous innovation when you see these type of capabilities coming out on a network. You’re going to see so much innovation on 5G. I said it before. it’s not a small sort of evolution from 4G, it’s a quantum leap going to 5G from 4G. You’re going to see a lot of innovation and new applications coming on top of the 5G networks.