AT&T Mobility: Analysis Of Deployment Of 5g

AT&T Inc. is the world’s largest telecommunications company headquartered at Whitacre tower in Downtown Dallas in Texas. This American multinational company is the largest provider of mobile telephone services and fixed telephone services in the United States through AT&T communications. The line of products offered by AT&T Inc. includes Satellite television, Fixed-line telephones, Mobile telephones, Internet services, Broadband, Digital television, Home security, IPTV, OTT services, Network security, Film production, Television production, Cable television, Pay television, Publishing, Podcasts, Sports management, News agency and Video games. 

AT&T Mobility also known as AT&T Wireless, marketed as simply AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph Company) is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides wireless service to 165. 9 million subscribers in United States. AT&T Mobility is the largest wireless telecommunication provider in the United States and Puerto Rico with its headquarters based on Brookhaven, Georgia, U. S. Originally known as Cingular Wireless, a joint venture by BellSouth and SBC Communications, the company acquired old AT&T wireless in 2004. SBC later acquired AT&T and adopted its name. Cingular became wholly owned by AT&T in December 2006 as a result of AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth. In April 2017 AT&T announced that the existing LTE networks in selected markets would be upgraded to support LTE advanced and LTE advance pro features which would be marketed as ‘5G Evolution’ (5G E) whereas with the advancements in the technology by January 2018 AT&T stated that it intended to deploy 5G NR by the end of the year. 5G NR i. e. New Radio is the new air interface developed for 5G networks which is supposed to be supported by the 3GPP 5G networks as the global standard for air interface. 

5G deployment type

5G basically offers ubiquitous connectivity with zero latency and a very high-speed Gigabit connection. AT&T have already deployed technologies that can enable peak theoretical wireless speeds for capable devices of at least 400Mb/s. The central theme of 5G is use of mm waves and MIMO antennas, as larger frequencies cannot travel longer distance and hence requires more transmitters operating with denser cells. 5G evolution technologies by AT&T includes LTE advanced technologies like carrier aggregation, 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM. 

5G is comprised of several technologies which drives for higher yields in both communications and data center architecture and majority of these efforts are focused on spectral efficiency, energy efficiency or the utilization. AT&T is developing 5G with 3 core 5G pillars: mobile 5G, fixed 5G and edge computing.

The key feature that distinguish AT&T 5G is directly moving forward with internationally recognized standards for 5G. After being deployed for trial and testing, AT&T 5G is now deployed for commercial purposes and is live for consumers in 10 markets. Millions of consumers and businesses across Birmingham, Indianapolis, LA, Milwaukee, Pittsburg, providence (R. I), Rochester(N. Y), San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose market areas can now access AT&T 5g through Samsung Galaxy Note+ 5G. 

Services offered/test use cases

AT&T 5G support compelling customer experience and service adoption by improving the network capacity and latency. Use cases of 5G by AT&T currently includes retail industry, 

Robotic manufacturing and mixed reality using googles. AT&T also brings in a video centric infrastructure including original content to customers, where video is a dominant use case. AT&T announced a partnership with Rush system for health to create 5G enabled hospitals in Chicago where MRIs can be instantly downloaded in a matter of seconds thus saving time. AT&T also moved forward with testing an edge-based computing system. In Israel AT&T along with Vorpal and Amdocs is working on drone tracking and geolocation applications. Standard works in photonics systems for higher capacity and lower latency is also included in 5G use cases by AT&T. 

Spectrum band used

For its low band, AT&T is using 850 MHz spectrum which the carrier says has a reach of about 2 miles from cell site and covers tens of millions of consumers and businesses. AT&T also plans to deliver nationwide sub-6 GHz 5g coverage in 2020. 

Technology provider/partner

In order to build the 5G network AT&T will be working with Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia as the technology Partners. AT&T had also announced in November 4th that it successfully completed 'world's first millimeter wave' 5G connection over a live network to what will be a commercially available 'standards-based' commercial mobile 5G device. However, the first device against expectations to be tested was not a smartphone but a Netgear Nighthawk 5G mobile Hotspot. This test was completed in Waco, Texas. 

Coverage areas

There are number of countries that have already experimented and implemented the 5G technology. This includes Canada, Mexico and the United stated in North America, Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain and the UK in Europe, Australia in Oceania and the countries like china, Bangladesh, Philippines, Qatar and South Korea in Asia. In Canada TELUS mobility expects 5G to be commercially available by 2020 whereas Rogers communications is working with Ericsson to roll out 5G across a multiyear network plan. 

AT&T’s standards based 5G networks went live in parts of 12 cities including Atlanta, GA, Charlotte, NC, Dallas, TX, Houston, Indianapolis, IN, Jacksonville, FL, Louisville, KY, Oklahoma City, OK, New Orleans, LA, Raleigh, NC, San Antonio, TX and Waco, TX. ATT have also announced its plans to extend this 5G roll out to 7 more cities including Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV, Nashville, TN, Orlando, FL, San Diego, CA, San Francisco, CA and San Jose, CA. 

With 5G being much talked about topic of present time it requires several steps both operationally and technically for the service providers to excel from one another and provide seemingly perfect 5G solutions. It is also important for every country and company and adopt to standards based 5G to allow for seamless global interoperability, connectivity, communication, and interactivity critical for innovation in times to come. 

References

• K. McCammon, 'AT&T's Trials and Path to 5G, ' 2019 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), San Diego, CA, USA, 2019, pp. 1-3.
• https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility
• https://www. digitaltrends. com/mobile/att-5g-rollout/
• https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/AT%26T
• https://developer. att. com/blog/5g-wireless-network-development