AT&T has not shied away from touting the importance of its FirstNet emergency responder program, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson reiterated its importance at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference.
The company began building FirstNet in 2016, which meant the company had technicians “climbing every cell tower” in the United States. So the opportunity then became “if you have to climb those towers anyhow, what else can you do?”
One important opportunity is to install the hardware infrastructure for 5G, so that only a software upgrade is necessary to turn on a standards-based 5G network. Stephenson estimated the full network would be ready to turn on “next year, about this time (May).
Also, upgrades made as part of that effort now mean AT&T “capacity is up over 50 percent in three years,” giving AT&T the “fastest network in the United States, now.”
What could happen in three to five years is perhaps more profound. “I do think, three to five years out, there is a crossover point where 5G passses home broadband, and 5G has better performance than fiber,” Stephenson said. Some will remain skeptical, but Stephenson believes AT&T will have a truly nationwide “fiber speed” network, using either 5G or fiber, across the entire United States.
That would be historically unprecedented. The old monopoly AT&T had a nearly-ubiquitous copper network. But in the post-divestiture market, no tier-one service provider has been able to sell broadband to “nearly every U.S. household” at speeds representing optical fiber performance.
If one sets fiber-to-home performance at about 1 Gbps, that claim implies 5G network performance faster than 1 Gbps. And even if one assumes a typical performance is less than that, speeds of hundreds of gigabits per second, nationwide (at least serving 200-plus million potential customers) coverage at such speeds would be unprecedented.
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