The 4G era has not been kind to Sprint. It went from a strong number three in the US wireless market to a distant fourth place behind T-Mobile. The company hopes that the move to 5G will help it regain market share and compete on network quality. CEO Marcelo Claure now says the carrier will begin its 5G rollout in the first half of 2019, putting it ahead of the other national carriers. However, that new network will likely come with higher plan prices.
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Billions of devices, from phones and tablets to self-driving cars and connected dishwashers, are thirstily awaiting the rise of 5G wireless connectivity, and the big wireless carriers are scrambling to bring these powerful new networks to market. According to documents obtained by Axios, however, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile might be nudged out of the race to 5G—not by an industry competitor, but by the U.S. government.
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Every carrier is clamoring to roll out a 5G network, or at least something they can reasonably market as 5G. After a long, long development period, the 3GPP wireless governance organization has released the first official 5G standard, known as 5G NR. Formalizing the 5G standard gives carriers and hardware makers the pieces they need to begin moving full speed ahead toward a 5G future. Maybe we can get this transition done without anyone re-branding their 4G service as 5G.
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5G is still a few years away for most of us, but networks and tech companies are laying the groundwork for it right now. One year ago, Qualcomm announced it was developing its first 5G-capable mobile modem, the X50. If you're not familiar with mobile SoCs, the modem is the component of a phone that connects to a cellular network. Qualcomm promised speeds of up to 5Gbps, with an expected ship date of 2018.
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We learned a few months ago that T-Mobile spent big in the FCC's recent 600MHz spectrum auction. The carrier dropped $7.99 billion on the spectrum licenses, which it has now officially been granted. It's wasting no time putting them to use. T-Mobile says it will begin rolling 600MHz coverage out to select markets over the summer.
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This is Sprint's Magic Box, the world's first all-wireless small cell, which promises to improve LTE data coverage and download speeds indoors. The plug-and-play unit is aimed at both small businesses and regular customers and offered at no extra cost, with availability subject to qualifying locations.
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Everyone's favorite performance-artist-CEO has put up another amazing video about his company's plans for 5G. We announced T-Mobile's recent purchase of whole swaths of the 600MHz spectrum, and today CEO John Legere announced in one of his regular videos exactly how it plans on using it. Some of it will be going to expand current 4G LTE capacity and penetration, but a portion is to be set aside for their future 5G implementation.
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I didn't think it would be AT&T, but I knew we could count on one of America's lovely carriers to open the door to the complete and utter ruination of any agreed-upon definition of "5G." Today, AT&T announced a bunch of new 4G LTE features (which is what they are) were being rolled out to its network, and it's given these features a name: 5G Evolution.
Now, the reason 5G has a qualifier is simple: because this isn't 5G. It'd be like taking the inline 4-cylinder engine out of your car, replacing it with a V6, but saying that you're now running a V8 Evolution, because hey, you're closer to a V8 than you were before.
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AT&T announced today that they're going to acquire Straight Path Communications, a holder of a number of millimeter wave spectrum licenses in the US for $1.6 billion. This brings them one step closer to realizing their AirGig plans for last-mile data infrastructure.
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The next standard for wireless connectivity has been in development by the 3GPP cellular standards group for some time now, and won't be ready for a while yet - at least not until 2018. But now the group has officially adopted "5G" as the name going forward, and created the above logo for it.
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