Verizon lit up St. Paul, Minn., as its fifth mobile 5G city on Thursday, along with its first 5G MiFi device, designed to serve the milllimeter wave network.

As is typical of higher frequency mmWave 5G deploments, Verizon's latest launch only covers part of the city, including the Downtown, Lowertown and West Seventh neighborhoods. Verizon has recorded maximum download speeds of up to 2 Gbit/s in its four mobile cities so far.

Verizon has previously launched mobile 5G in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Providence.

Additionally, Verizon launched a business-focused 5G device, the Inseego 5G MiFi M1000 hotspot. This device lets you share the 5G signal, via WiFi, to smartphones and other devices.

Figure 1: Inseego 5G Mifi hotspot

Verizon priced the device at $499.99 with a two-year contract, or 24 monthly payments of $27.08. Full retail price is $649.99.

Verizon says that business customers can get a $60 per month plan with 35GB of blended 4G/5G service for the device.

Verizon consumers with an active unlimited smartphone plan can add a 5G MiFi M1000 to their account and get 50GB of 5G data and 15GB of 4G LTE data to use via the MiFi device -- an increase of $10 over 4G LTE service rates. Connected device-only plans start at $85 a month.

Why this matters
This is Verizon's first business-focused device on its 5G network. Verizon has to date sold the Samsung S10 5G, the LG V50 5G and Motorola v3 and v4 smartphones (with 5G add-on modules) on its mobile 5G networks.

In contrast, AT&T has sold its Netgear Nighthawk 5G MiFi hotspot solely to selected business customers and developers since it rolled out initial 5G markets at the tail-end of 2018.

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— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading