Here is a quick overview of each test market and what they learned:
Waco, Texas
Participants: Small and mid-sized businesses
- Provided 5G mmWave service to a retail location more than 150 meters away from the cell site and observed wireless speeds of approximately 1.2 Gbps in a 400 MHz channel.
- Observed latency rates at 9-12 milliseconds.
- Latency impacts things like the time between pressing play and seeing a video start to stream or hitting a web link and seeing a webpage begin to load. For context, MIT researchers discovered the human brain “latency” is 13 milliseconds.
- Supported hundreds of simultaneous connected users using the 5G network.
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Participants: Small businesses
- Observed no impacts on 5G mmWave signal performance due to rain, snow or other weather events.
- Learned mmWave signals can penetrate materials such as significant foliage, glass and even walls better than initially anticipated.
- Observed more than 1 Gbps speeds under line of sight conditions up to 900 feet. That’s equal to the length of 3 football fields.
South Bend, Indiana
Participants: Small business and residential customers
- Observed a full end-to-end 5G network architecture, including the 5G radio system and core, demonstrating extremely low latency.
- Successfully provided gigabit wireless speeds on mmWave spectrum in both line of sight and some non-line of sight conditions.
“By conducting these trials and inventing specialized measurement equipment to study other aspects of 5G in great detail, we collected mountains of data and insights to comb through, obsess over and ultimately act on. These trial learnings are guiding our commercial 5G launches this year and will help ensure we’re building a 5G network that is both real and reliable for everyone.” Said Melissa Arnoldi is president of AT&T Technology & Operations.
AT&T has said they plan to launch 5G in the United States by the end of 2018.
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