AT&T has five top priorities, and 5G is No. 3 on that list, said Scott Mair, president of AT&T operations, during an interview at Cowen and Company’s Technology, Media, and Telecom conference. The FirstNet buildout and the operator’s LTE Advanced network deployment, which AT&T calls “5GE,” are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.
Mair described AT&T’s approach to 5G as two deployment processes: small cells on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum and traditional macro cell towers. AT&T’s 5G network, which is live in 19 cities, is exclusively powered by small cells on mmWave, but that will change during the next 12 months, Mair explained.
“This time next year we’ll have nationwide coverage of 5G on a macro tower backed up by our 5G evolution advanced capability on those same towers,” he said. AT&T’s LTE Advanced network is operating in 500 markets now, and deployments are underway in other cities using spectrum that wasn’t previously being used, according to Mair.
As for AT&T’s 5G deployment on mmWave, he said momentum is growing but the permits that cities require for small cells to be installed is a “slow process overall.” As such, small cells are going to have a smaller footprint than macro radio towers, he explained.
Mair declined to say how many small cells AT&T has deployed to date, but he said overall network deployments are up two- to three-fold on a year-over-year basis. He also talked about the operator’s efforts to identify unique use cases for 5G in hospitals, factories, venues, and smart cities. “We believe the best opportunity right now is in the enterprise business space,” Mair said.
Network virtualization, which rounds out AT&T’s list of priorities (No. 4 is fiber deployments), is also an ongoing effort, Mair explained. “The 5G core that will be coming into production in the next couple years across operators has a fundamental capability to architect services on top of that core,” he said.
“In the LTE world it’s been very difficult to architect services other than broadband-based applications,” Mair said. “With the new core we’ll be able to architect services specific to IoT, or maybe video applications or certain use cases that face off to needs of enterprise customers. That gives us an innovation platform that was not necessarily there in the LTE environment.”
Putting applications closer to customers with low-latency and staying connected to the network core for basic control functions will also enable network slicing and create new business models for the operator, Mair said. However, his comments suggest that some of those new capabilities may not arrive until 2021 or later.
AT&T’s self-imposed deadline for nationwide 5G coverage has been a moving target of late. During the last two months, executives have said early 2020, mid 2020 and by the end of 2020. Moreover, AT&T considers nationwide as a network that covers up to 200 million people. More than 328 million people live in the United States today.