Verizon CTO Kyle Malady (pictured) told a conference dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technology used in a nationwide low-band 5G rollout was working well, though he acknowledged deployment remained a work in progress.

At an investor conference, Malady said DSS is “absolutely meeting our targeted engineering requirements at the moment”, with more than 200 million points-of-presence covered so far.

“Frankly we’re seeing the speeds, the performance that we expected”, he stated, adding Verizon had spent “a lot of time on this” in partnership with Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Qualcomm.

In an apparent nod to criticism by rival T-Mobile US, Malady noted Verizon is still “optimising and working on it”.

The operator has also faced further pressure on its DSS credentials from consultancy Signals Research Group, which recently released a report flagging “significant inefficiencies” in Verizon and AT&T’s use of DSS following its own trials.

However, it noted total throughput on Verizon’s network was boosted by its use of 3.5GHz spectrum, which provided “the bulk of the data speeds” achieved in testing compared with low-band 5G.

Malady told investors Verizon had deployed 3.5GHz on “a few thousand” sites to date, primarily outdoors, adding it views the frequency as “an easy way to add some capacity in places that we need to”.