NGMN Conference: Will rush for New Radio compromise 5G quality?

The US operators have ended their long love affair with sub-1 GHz spectrum, which was so important to their LTE coverage roll-outs, and are leading the world in harnessing high frequency bands to address the challenge of the expected capacity demands of the 5G era. While regulators and operators in some areas – many in Europe, for instance – see the centimetre and millimeter wave bands as a second phase, adding targeted dense capacity after a more conventional sub-6 GHz network has been built out, the US carriers are impatient to start using the underpopulated high frequency bands. AT&T and Verizon see the tactical opportunity to extend their fixed broadband footprints using cost-effective wireless, and since this use case does…