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AT&T has launched a FWA service on its standalone 5G network.
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The Tier 1 telco said it is working with customers on 5G network slicing.
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Connected cars will aim to be on its standalone network at some point in the near future.
AT&T has moved forward with its cloud-native standalone (SA) 5G network deployment, after being the last United States-based mobile network operator (MNO) to move to a pure 5G system. The Tier 1 telco is starting to cut out the 4G control plane that previously hamstrung its 5G efforts.
“Our team has made significant progress enabling standalone 5G, and we’re developing technology and services that run on top of the AT&T network,” said Chris Sambar, president of AT&T network in a blog this week.
The network boss noted that AT&T (NYSE:T) has seen a 30% increase in traffic over the last three years. The carrier started to move to a 5G SA core in late 2022, and Sambar said that the MNO now is adding thousands of customers daily to the AT&T 5G SA network.
Sambar said that AT&T recently launched its fixed wireless access (FWA) home internet 5G service, AT&T Internet Air, on its standalone network.
“T-Mobile and Verizon have already demonstrated how successful FWA has been as a 5G standalone application,” Dave Bolan, research director at Dell’Oro Group. “We would expect AT&T to have similar success.”
“In the not-too-distant future, 5G connected cars will ride on AT&T’s standalone 5G,” Sambar claimed but didn't specify how far in the future that would be.
Nonetheless, Sambar said that AT&T is moving ahead on its network slicing efforts. “We’re already working with customers – including healthcare, manufacturing, public sector and more – to address use cases with functionalities that require critical network access,” he said.
This follows the T-Mobile and Verizon network slicing trials earlier this year.
Sambar said that its network slicing could provide specialized high-bandwidth access for doctors and healthcare professionals as they transmit medical imaging files or patient records in hospitals, or low-latency cloud gaming set-ups.
None of the major U.S. MNOs have actually launched a commercial network slicing service, but that may change soon. “We believe network slicing will be more common in the second-half of 2023,” Dell’Oro’s Bolan noted.
However, Silverlinings isn’t even so sure it will show up commercially in the U.S. in 2023. Network slicing has been promised for so long now, and except in China, it really hasn’t arrived yet.
We’ll believe it when we see it.