Although the still unfinished 5G standard is all telcos want to talk about, AT&T says its LTE-A network will eventually hit 1Gbps speeds.
At Nomura’s 2016 Media, Telecom and Internet Conference in New York, AT&T CTO and President of AT&T Labs, Andre Feutsch, was a speaker.
The event was reported on by FierceWireless which quoted Fuetsch extensively on AT&T's LTE network and 5G future, with Fuetsch stating: “There’s a lot of focus on 5G – but don’t discount LTE.
“LTE is still here. And LTE will be around for a long time. And LTE has also enormous potential in that, you’ll be capable of supporting 1 gigabit speeds as well.”
“You’ll see a focus in the near term of taking advantage of our LTE capabilities. And there’s a lot of capability and feature functionality, a lot we can do with it.”
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FierceWireless noted Fuetsch pointing out carrier aggregation, noting that AT&T would be expanding that in the future.
Carrier aggregation is popular in Australia, too, with Telstra a major proponent in its quest to deliver superfast LTE-A speeds - and with similar activity from Australia’s other major telcos.
Carrier aggregation isn’t new to AT&T, the company first delved into the technology in 2014, and other telcos around the world are upgrading their networks to use the same bandwidth boosting tricks, too.
After all, all the talk might be around 5G, but with no finalised 5G standard, LTE networks have a long life yet and its fantastic to see they continue being upgraded before 5G officially arrives to eventually make LTE-‘O’ for ‘obsolete’.
Of course, AT&T didn’t miss the chance to talk up 5G, with Fierce quoting Fuetsch stating of 5G tech that “We’re right there, we’re going to lead in 5G,” he said. “We have several trials going on right now and we’re seeing some tremendous results from those trials,” noting one trial in Austin Texas delivered ’14Gbps to one user.’
That’s seriously impressive, but still it’s a long way to go before 14Gbps speeds are available, whether to a group of users or on an individual basis.
Fuetsch promised more to come, stating: “You’ll see us sharing more about the trial activity we’re doing.
“Everything that’s being trialked right now is not standard, it’s all sort of proprietary. But this is an important process to go through because this is how you learn and how it helps define standards. We’re making sure 5G evolves. This is still a couple of years out.”
Fierce also quoted Fuetsch noting AT&T’s work in SDN and NFV - software-defined networking and network function virtualisation as part of the work needed to move to 5G in the future.
