On the heels of EchoStar spectrum acquisition, AT&T gives strategy update
During the excellent Mobile Future Forward event in Seattle, Washington, RCR Wireless News sat down with AT&T SVP and Network CTO Yigal Elbaz to get a strategy update. Our chat came a little more than a week after AT&T announced it was spending $23 billion to acquire 50 megahertz of EchoStar’s low- and mid-band spectrum, so lots to talk about.
Bottom line, Elbaz said, “We’re playing to win and we’re going to make sure that we have all of the assets that we need in order for us to have long-term leadership when it comes to advanced networking.” He said the 30 megahertz of mid-band 3.45 GHz spectrum would be deployed “relatively quickly” via software upgrade to support the company’s 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) offering, which has emerged as a standout 5G use case and a competitive battleground between mobile network operators and the cable companies who have traditionally been the primary players in home broadband.
AT&T obviously has extensive fiber holdings that support home broadband. “Everywhere we have fiber, we think that is the best broadband technology by far,” Elbaz said. “However, some of the customers tell us they would prefer a wireless and wireless convergence. We can satisfy that.”
He explained that AT&T’s fiber-first strategy is not changing, simply being augmented in an effort to take share faster. “There are areas where we know that fiber is coming in the next couple of years.” In the meantime, FWA can be put in market. “There are other areas where we know we won’t have fiber anytime soon,” so, again, FWA can be sold. This new spectrum holdings will also help accelerate a migration off of legacy copper which aligns with AT&T’s broader network modernization efforts.
In addition to the newly acquired mid-band, AT&T also acquired 20 megahertz of nationwide low-band spectrum in the 600 MHz band. “For us, that’s going to be a new band,” Elbaz said. With the need to deploy new radios across its grid, “Obviously that’s going to take a little more time.” With regards to that piece, he discussed shifting data patterns prompted by the proliferation of AI and IoT traffic that are more demanding on the uplink as compared to typical data patterns. Another boost comes by way of AT&T’s current nationwide 5G RedCap (and eventual eRedCap) capabilities.
Also of note here, in November 2023, AT&T announced a $14 billion, five-year Open RAN deal with Ericsson. The goal is for 70% of AT&T’s wireless network traffic to flow across open-capable platforms by late 2026. In addition to using Ericsson radios, AT&T has also integrated third-party radios from 1Finity (formerly Fujitsu’s network products business, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu). Elbaz said this commitment to openness would continue as the low-band spectrum is put into service.
We also chatted about the outlook for direct-to-device (D2D) services provided by non-terrestrial networks. This is a nascent space (get it?) but the primary talk track in the industry is around the ability to send text messages in areas not served by terrestrial networks — you’re lost in the woods and need help basically. But how meaningful is that capability to a mass market audience, and how much are they willing to pay for it?
Some users “would enjoy to know that they are connected,” Elbaz said. “I think it’s actually very applicable to many customers.” At this point, we’re at “the beginning of understanding what will be appealing to consumers…I think this is what we’re going to find out over time is how this is going to get consumed…The ability to have an alternate way of supporting our customers in certain areas..I think it’s a great asset to have. It’s very innovative.”
We had an interesting (I thought) exchange around AT&T’s pioneering work in virtualization, then in cloud-based networking, and how that all relates to the historical 10-year generations of cellular networks — topical in that the conference featured a good bit of discussion on the commercial appetite for 6G. The standardization body 3GPP kicked off work on 6G earlier this year; there’s not currently a defined timeline for when the standard, Release 21, but think a functional free in 2028 ahead of early commercialization in 2030.
Reflecting on AT&T’s history with virtualization and cloud, as well as its work with Microsoft on running the core network in the Azure cloud, Elbaz said, “Our industry needs to move away from calling it names and digits. First of all, we’re making progress in our wireless network daily, and we don’t communicate this…The architecture is different. It is cloud-native like it or not. We are bringing AI into the wireless architecture and it’s software-based and none of this works in 10-year cycles…I want to be able to progress our network with a software push. I think it’s doable. I think this is what we all need to strive for.”
