AT&T Inc. the American multinational telecommunication company will be boosting the mobile network services. The company is aiming to launch mobile 5G services to the consumers by late 2018. The mobile 5G services are claimed to hit the network market earlier than the expected.
As per the Telecompaper report, Labs chief and CTO Andre Fuetsch stated that there was a recent agreement by 3GPP to accelerate some elements in the 5G new radio (NR) timeline. Also, it is reported that forty-seven global operators and vendors have signed the new proposal. The accelerated schedule is reported to be a plan to complete key components of the 5G standards. This is indeed to start chipset development in December 2017, which is six months ahead of the expected 3GPP full Release 15.
It is reported that the December 2017 standards milestone from the company will unveil the first complete picture of a holistic 5G system, enabling hardware, chipset, and device manufacturers to start their development earlier. Also, it was noted that operators will be able to provide standards-based mobile 5G services to the customers soon and is a target to in 2019.
Telecompaper earlier reported from the Gordon Mansfield, AT&T's Vice President RAN & Device Design, that the company will soon be heading toward 5G and they are testing pre-commercial applications already.
It is reported that AT&T's network has about 137 petabytes of data traffic which cross on an average business day. The CTO states that data traffic on AT&T's mobile network has grown more than 250,000 percent as of now when compared with 2007. The video traffic is considered to be the one making more than half of mobile data traffic and it was measured last year that video traffic grew over 75 percent and 75 percent of the data traffic is from smartphones.
AT&T said it supports both non-standalone and standalone options for the 5G standard and this will be part of its AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo platform. All capabilities will run on its Open Network Automation Platform. It is believed that the December 2017 timeline will bring the availability of hardware for both options.
