This post was originally published on Light Reading
MWC23 – AT&T’s midband 5G rollout started later and in a lower gear than either T-Mobile or Verizon’s, but 2023 should see the carrier approach cruising speed on those fast frequencies.
That forecast-as-sales-pitch came from AT&T’s Gordon Mansfield, vice president for global technology planning, network planning and engineering, during a meeting at the recent MWC Barcelona trade show.
But while the carrier expects 2023 to be a breakout year for its C-band and 3.45GHz-3.55GHz spectrum, deploying standalone 5G and FWA 5G remain lower-order bits for the Dallas company.
During a 30-minute conversation, Mansfield also discussed AT&T’s partnership with Microsoft for network management and how it does not equate to the carrier putting all of its bets on the cloud.
Coming soon in more places: C-band and 3.45
AT&T lit up its C-band spectrum last January alongside Verizon but in far fewer places, and it’s since made much less noise about taking its midband service beyond those first eight markets as well as its subsequent deployment of 3.45GHz frequencies. AT&T waited until November to update its coverage maps to highlight this faster coverage in dark blue.
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on Light Reading.
