Exclusive: Mapping Sprint Vs. Verizon 5G Coverage In NYC

5G has hit Broadway, but think of it as being in previews.

- Sascha Segan

Now that both Verizon and Sprint offer 5G service in New York City, I set out to chart how they’re doing. I walked around several neighborhoods on Friday, October 11, to see whether Sprint’s 5G offers an experience worthy of the name. I also made maps of Verizon’s mysterious, unmapped 5G network.

I used a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G phone for Sprint and a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G for Verizon. I used Ookla field test software, which ran a speed test every two minutes, along with a routine that captured the network indicator in the status bar every minute. I spot-checked the software and visual network indicators against the phone’s service mode screen.

On all the images in this story, the orange dots are 5G; blue dots are 4G.

VERIZON: VERY LITTLE COVERAGE

Verizon’s millimeter-wave 5G approach offers spectacular speeds and capacity, often above 1Gbps, but not very much coverage since the cell sites only have 600- to 800-foot radiuses. Verizon first launched in April in Chicago and Minneapolis, and has since been filling in the downtown areas of both cities—as well as 10 others.

But the company’s lack of coverage maps has been leading it to overpromise coverage by specifying broad neighborhoods where it hasn’t fully built out. In New York, Verizon promises coverage in “parts” of “Midtown, Financial District, Harlem, East Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, and Washington Heights” in Manhattan, as well as neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In my testing, I found “parts” to mean as little as two blocks of a large neighborhood. If it can’t cover full neighborhoods, Verizon should specify exactly which blocks have service.

Verizon Networks in Harlem