Seen & Heard: AT&T Widens Fixed Wireless 5G Trials

AT&T announced Wednesday that its fixed wireless 5G trials will be in three additional markets by the end of the year.

After launching its second fixed wireless 5G trial in June in Austin, AT&T will kick the tires with residential and business customers in Waco, Texas; Kalamazoo, Michigan; and South Bend, Indiana.

In the Austin trial, which is using millimeter wave spectrum, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) said it was seeing speeds of up to 1 Gbits/s and latency rates under 10 milliseconds for the radio link at customer trial locations. AT&T has streamed DirecTV Now, 360-degree video, and international videoconferencing to local businesses, an apartment unit, a car wash and a church in Austin.

"In Austin, we see all types of weather and substantial foliage," said Marachel Knight, senior vice president of Wireless Network Architecture and Design at AT&T, in a prepared statement. "Taking our fixed wireless 5G trials out of the lab and into the real world helps us learn important factors about mmWave and 5G. And in doing so, we’re learning how to better design our network for the future."

While standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is still crafting the 5G standards, service providers, such as AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), are trying to get ahead of the curve with pre-standard trials. AT&T said in today's release that it hopes the 5G trials will accelerate standards-based deployments by late 2018. It's expected that fixed wireless 5G services will be deployed worldwide by 2019.

According to analysts from SNS Telecom, operators are projected to rake in $1 billion from fixed wireless 5G services in 2019 with Verizon and AT&T accounting for the bulk of that amount. (See Analysts Predict $1B Revenue From Fixed 5G in 2019.)

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation