AT&T will let the market decide where to deploy — 5G CTO Andre Fuetsch

Carriers are starting to
roll out 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless
technology.
Shutterstock

• AT&T is starting to roll out its 5G, or fifth generation,
  wireless network.
• Like previous wireless standards, 5G promises faster speeds.
• But to get the fastest 5G speeds, users will need to connect
  to radios that deliver the service at super-high frequencies.
• AT&T doesn’t plan to deploy those radios everywhere, but
  will let the market guide it, Andre Fuetsch, chief technology
  officer of its Communications division, told Business Insider.

You could soon get internet speeds on your phone that rival the
fastest you can get through a landline broadband connection,
thanks to a new generation of wireless technology that the
carriers are starting to roll out.

Among the carriers that are launching the new service — dubbed
5G, for fifth
generation wireless technology — is AT&T. Last week, the
company announced
it now plans to roll out 5G service in 12 cities by the end of
the year and named the seven cities it plans to connect to its 5G
network early next year.

The company is in the process of rolling out the equipment needed
to support the new wireless standard across the country. But it
plans to let the market guide when and where it turns on 5G,
Andre Fuetsch, the chief technology officer at AT&T’s
Communications division, told Business Insider in an interview
last week.

“Over time we’ll just have see how much [5G] device penetration
happens over time,” Fuetsch said. “That will determine, really,
the pace of how 5G gets built.”

Unlike Verizon, whose 5G network relies on some of its own
proprietary technology, AT&T’s is compliant with the
specification developed by 3GPP, the standards body for the
wireless industry, Fuetsch said. That means that phones on
AT&T’s 5G network will be able to seamlessly switch over to
older 4G radios when needed, and the company won’t have to
upgrade its equipment or customers phones after the fact to be
compatible with the standard.

5G promises super-fast speeds — with the right radios

Like previous wireless standards, 5G promises faster speeds than
its predecessors. Unlike with those past technologies, though,
the throughput consumers will get with 5G could match or better
those they see on their home internet connections. In certain
cases, they could see speeds of 1 gigabit per second or faster,
which is roughly what fiber-optic broadband services such as
Verizon’s Fios offer.

Andre
Fuetsch, chief technology officer of AT&T’s Communications
division, is helping guide the carrier’s 5G
effort.
AT&T

But the actual speeds users see on 5G could vary a lot from place
to place. That’s because to deliver the fastest service, carriers
will have to deploy radio towers that can transmit at so-called
millimeter-wave
frequencies. These are frequency bands in the range of 24 gigahertz and
higher.

Those bands have the potential to transmit data very rapidly. But
they come with some significant trade-offs. Signals sent in those
bands don’t go through walls and can be easily blocked. And they
don’t tend to travel very far, so to cover the same amount of
area that they were able to serve with lower frequency bands,
they’ll have to use a lot more radio towers, potentially making
deployment much more expensive.

Carriers can use lower frequency bands to deliver 5G service, but
the speed is only moderately faster than what can be delivered
with 4G, Fuetsch said. Peak speeds might reach around 1 gigabit
per second, but average speeds will likely be in the hundreds of
megabits per second, he said.

In addition to faster speeds, 5G also promises lower latency,
which is the amount of time it takes for the network to respond
to or pass along a signal from your phone.

“If you’re in one of our millimeter-wave zones … you can expect
gigabit-plus speeds. Not just peak speeds but average speeds,” he
said.

In other 5G areas, he continued, “you certainly will get some
speed advantages, you will also get reduced latency, but you
won’t get as much speed as you would with a millimeter wave
connection.”

Millimeter-wave 5G will only be available in “pockets”

For now, AT&T plans to offer millimeter-wave 5G service only
in dense parts of certain cities where there’s already a lot of
traffic on its network. By contrast, the company plans to deploy
5G over lower frequency bands throughout its coverage area, even
within those same cities, as a way to fill in the gaps for where
it won’t have millimeter-wave radio towers, Fuetsch said.

5G
wireless technology promises internet speeds of 1 gigabit per
second and faster.

Troy
Wolverton/Business Insider

“You will see parts of cities, pockets, zones of cities, that
will be lit up with millimeter wave,” he said. Because the
signals don’t travel very far and don’t go through walls, “you’re
likely not going to see every single street.”

AT&T will offer its first 5G device — a mobile hotspot gadget
that subscribers can use to wirelessly connect their computers to
the internet — later this year. Consumers will be able to buy the
first phones for the company’s 5G network sometime next year,
Fuetsch said. He decline to give a more specific time frame.

Fuetsch also wouldn’t say when AT&T expects to offer anything
resembling nationwide 5G service. The company plans to turn on
service in particular areas as increasing numbers of customers in
those areas get 5G devices, he said.

All of the equipment AT&T is installing these days is
compatible with 5G, Fuetsch said. So, the company turn on the
service with a simple software upgrade, he said.

“We let the market drive it, but we’re seeding all these cities
with 5G to help start that drive,” he said.

Other carriers are also starting to roll out their 5G networks.
Last week, Verizon
announced it will start delivering home internet access via
its next-generation wireless network on October 1. Meanwhile,
T-Mobile
announced a $3.5 billion deal with Ericsson to have the
latter build out the carrier’s 5G network.