AT&T CEO Sees Nationwide 5G Footprint in a Year; Verizon Defends 1st Deployments
AT&T will have a “nationwide 5G footprint” by this time next year, CEO Randall Stephenson said at a JPMorgan financial conference. Adam Koeppe, Verizon senior vice president-network strategy and planning, defended the company’s first high-band 5G deployments at a MoffettNathanson conference also Tuesday.
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FirstNet deployment will increase AT&T’s mobile network capacity by 50 percent, a “dramatic” change, Stephenson said. “I've never witnessed anything like this,” he said: “Just halfway through, we're beginning to separate ourselves from the pack in terms of the ability to deliver high-speed connectivity to our mobile customers. We are now unquestionably the fastest, highest performing network in the United States.”
The launch of 5G will change how people live, Stephenson said. “You and I could be riding in a car together,” he said. “We have a watch connected, a smartphone connected, the car is connected, thousands of simultaneous connections.” The main thing government can do to help spur 5G is to make more spectrum available, Stephenson said, giving Chairman Ajit Pai and the FCC “a lot of credit.”
The FCC should also continue its work to speed the siting of small cells and macro towers, Stephenson said. With 5G, “you're talking tens and hundreds of thousands of permits … across multiple municipalities in every single state,” he said: “In China, you don't have a lot of municipal approvals to get 5G deployed and small cells deployed, and so that's what we're competing against in this race to 5G.” Stephenson said AT&T spent $25 billion on its network last year, with another $23 billion targeted for 2019. “We're expecting our capital spending rate to come down over the next couple of years, and for the simple reason that there are a lot of projects that are not 5G that are coming off the table,” he said.
During the presentation by Koeppe, MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett said his firm’s research found that it will be “really hard” to build deployments like Verizon’s early 5G efforts “into a business.” Koeppe said he was familiar with the research and the propagation characteristics of high-band spectrum has long been understood.
“Networks are not just a function of the propagation of the radio,” Koeppe said: “There’s a design. There’s a performance and an optimization that goes along with it.” Verizon has been focused on optimizing the network, he said. “Not everything is perfect on day one, obviously,” he said. Verizon’s focus has been “how can this band work in an actual access deployment,” he said.
The FirstNet contract “is really working” and has been a “huge win for us,” AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said at the MoffettNathanson conference. The FirstNet build is helping AT&T quickly upgrade its network to 5G, he said. “We’re getting dramatic speed uptakes. … That’s what’s driving the business.”
Stephens also discussed the importance of its advertising business to AT&T. “Advertising is a huge opportunity,” he said: “We’re unique because we’re distributors, we’re content, we have the data, and we’re a big advertising company in the sense of both providing advertising but also buying advertising.” Mid-band and high-band spectrum are both important to 5G, Stephens said, noting that AT&T has 350 MHz of millimeter-wave spectrum on average nationwide in the 39 GHz band. It has used the 39 GHz band in its initial 19 5G markets, he said.