Jason Porter, president of AT&T’s FirstNet business and public sector, said Tuesday that a hybrid wireless and fixed network deployment approach is key to support tremendous growth in uplink needs and a broad range of use cases.
Porter’s purview spans AT&T’s dedicated public safety network FirstNet, federal customers like the DoD and other agencies, as well as state and local government and education.
AT&T is building out its 5G network, with low-band spectrum currently covering 255 million people and mmWave spectrum in limited parts of 40 cities. On the spectrum side, Porter said during an investor conference today that AT&T is using its full suite, including CBRS in some places. And he reiterated AT&T is on track to meet coverage targets of 70-75 million people with C-band by the end of 2022 (also saying there “there’s no credible evidence for any legitimate interference concerns” to airplane equipment that the FAA has raised warnings about).
For FirstNet it has 20 MHz of band 14 spectrum that commercial users get access to when public safety users don’t need the airwaves free and clear. It’s also increasing its fiber presence with plans to pass 16.5 million homes by the end of the year and double its fiber coverage to 30 million locations by 2025.
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As AT&T’s 5G networks grows the carrier’s fiber footprint expands as well, he noted.
“Our strategy is our network is going to be hybrid fixed and wireless. As we build out millimeters wave, every tower is going to have fiber, even just base 5G towers have fiber,” Porter said Tuesday speaking at the Oppenheimer 5G Summit. 5G also allows for separation of the user and control plane functions, he noted, and compute to be placed in different locations closer to the end user with MEC capabilities for new applications.
Universities early on board for 5G
Porter cited university campuses as one example of early 5G users in his segment and where the hybrid approach is needed, as an either-or deployment won’t fit the bill.
“Higher education is really jumping on 5G quickly,” he said, adding that within the hybrid approach a range of 5G spectrum also is needed to support different uses.
In recent deployments, Porter described a set up where sub-6 GHz 5G is used for broad campus coverage to keep faculty and students connected. Meanwhile, fixed line assets and high capacity mmWave spectrum is deployed in a targeted setting like an engineering building for throughput and low latency capabilities.
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“We’re seeing so much growth in uplink speeds and capacity that you’d want to put a fixed asset there, a wireline capability into the building,” Porter said. “But even within that [engineering] building we’re seeing robotics labs that they’re starting to put millimeter wave in the robotics lab and a multi-access edge compute node that is that user plane put on the edge, on the same floor with the robotics lab.”
That delivers very low latency and extremely fast speeds for students and faculty to operate robots and develop new applications that could benefit communities in years to come, he continued.
Higher education has been in focus for AT&T this year. It added the University of Connecticut as a partner this spring to build a private 5G network on campus, and over the summer turned on a mmWave 5G testbed at the University of Tennessee. Other partners include Texas A&M and the University of Missouri. Roughly a year ago the operator opened a 5G research lab with the Purdue College of Engineering.
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Another hybrid setup for higher education is deploying fiber straight to where the students are living.
“Part of the reason is they’re consuming massive bandwidth” for activities like 4K streaming, he said. But it’s the boom in uplink need that’s key to delivering a hybrid approach, with Porter pointing to growth in activities like gaming and AR/VR capabilities that can be delivered either on-prem or on the network edge.
To that point, he said the ratio of downlink to uplink used to be around 10:1 but as uplink capacity needs increase it’s now closer to 5:1.
“So we believe that our hybrid deployment style with fixed and wireless is absolutely critical and sets us up for tremendous success of all these use cases because you won’t be able to execute these use cases just on either or, it’s really going to takes that hybrid capability to serve the variety of things that are being demanded by our customers,” Porter added.
Massive IoT in the public sector is one more example he pointed to of how 5G and hybrid networks can support diverse use cases and relates to the growth in uplink volumes AT&T anticipates in the future.
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In terms of applications public sector customers are looking at leveraging AT&T’s 5G capabilities for, he highlighted the DoD is exploring operating runways and robotics to disarm bombs. Public safety is deploying drones and looking at how robotics can help keep firefighters safe by going in to assess a dangerous environment. And the community is eying AR/VR capabilities, deploying body cams, facial recognition and license plate recognition and “infusing that into city infrastructure.”
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of uplink coming from these massive IoT deployments, that we need to continue to deploy a hybrid infrastructure or else the wireless network will be challenged with the new uplink speeds,” Porter explained.
Competitor Verizon has been following its own strategy of leveraging and planning fiber expansions to support multiple applications for wireless and wireline under one program.