AT&T is in the unfamiliar and unwelcome position of being third-placed in the US wireless market, having been overtaken by the T-Mobile marketing juggernaut, enlarged by Sprint with its big spectrum dowry. AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh told an investor event: “I want to be very transparent with that. We find ourselves not as the share leader, and it has been many years since we’ve actually grown our wireless premium postpaid business.”
His strategy to reverse that situation is to target growth in key industries and locations where AT&T believes 5G usage should rise steeply, at least post-pandemic, such as sports venues, retail, gaming, travel and transport, healthcare and public safety. In addition, it will layer on more enterprise 5G-related capabilities such as enhanced security and edge computing, with a dose of fixed wireless (see separate item).
To enable all that, it will expand its fiber network to an additional 3m locations in 90 metro areas this year; along with building out high capacity 5G in its new midband spectrum, when that is cleared of satellite incumbents. The C-band spectrum is critical to AT&T’s ability to catch up with Verizon in network quality and TMO in an optimal coverage/capacity balance. It aims to cover 75m people in midband spectrum by 2022 and 100m in 2023, but that is a less ambitious target than either of its rivals outlined for their midband airwaves.
AT&T intends to leverage its fiber to improve its 5G, as well as its fixed-line, services. By increasing the depth and reach of its fiber it will require lower levels of 5G densification, avoiding site and indoor deployment complexities, and making full use of an asset that is unmatched by TMO (with no fiber) or Verizon (with a limited footprint).
“As we design our network and our offers in the market, you will see us densify our wireless network on the top of our investments in fiber. We choose to serve our customers that demand high speed bandwidth with fiber and we will utilize our wireless networks to serve as other niche use cases in areas where fiber economics do not make sense,” McElfresh said.
AT&T committed to expand its millimeter wave 5G network to 17 venues by the end of 2021, bringing its total footprint to 40 locations plus seven airports and parts of 38 cities. Its 600 MHz 5G network currently covers 230m residents in 14,000 cities and towns.
Verizon is also thinking in terms of a holistic view of 5G/fibre networks and it has made more progress than AT&T in adopting a converged operations structure, rather than just planning for technology enablers like converged core. Although it does not reach nearly as many locations with fiber as its rival, it does plan to cross-sell between 4G, 5G and fiber, and between fixed and mobile broadband, in order to improve its penetration of each home.
This will be important to fend off T-Mobile, which has an aggressive 5G home roadmap – which was one of the key selling points to competition regulators for its acquisition of Sprint. It argued that, armed with Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, it could build a wireless-only quad play platform, delivering home broadband and TV as well as mobile services and providing a new competitor to Verizon and AT&T. The focus on the home 5G market by the big converged telcos suggests its arguments may bear fruit and consumers will indeed have new fixed broadband and video choices in future.
Ronan Dunne, CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, said that the operator aimed to “convert as many of these homes as possible…into mobile and home customers”. Verizon will cover 15m people with 4G or 5G home Internet services by the end of the year, increasing that figure to 50m by 2025.
Dunne claimed that Verizon will have lower capacity challenges than cablecos once it builds out its new networks, and it expects to attract about 20% of home Internet customers in markets where it launches fixed wireless. Across fixed and mobile, Verizon predicts that 5G will increase its total revenues by at least 4% by 2024, up from 2% growth anticipated for 2021 compared to 2020.
“When we launched 4G, the market could not see what was coming around the corner. Or that in a matter of years, stepping out from the curb and hailing a cab would become obsolete,” explained Verizon’s CEO Hans Vestberg. “We’re about to turn that corner again. And there will be the next generation of unicorns ready to innovate on what we are building. That’s not a prediction; it’s a promise.”
Verizon plans to upgrade 7,000 to 8,000 of its 64,000 cell towers with C-band radios supplied by Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia, but it does not plan to add more cell sites to its grid for C-band. It expects to increase the number of its mmWave cell sites from 17,000 today to 30,000 by the end of 2021 and more after that.
It will use its own fiber for xHaul wherever possible and claims to have more sites on its own fiber than other operators, with about one-third of its 4G and 5G locations serviced by its own xHaul, a figure it plans to boost to 50% in the next three years.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile may not have fiber assets, but it does plan to leverage its 2.5 GHz spectrum and its early deployment of a 5G core to diversify its business model while its major competitors are still grappling with new architectures and spectrum debts. John Saw, EVP of advanced and emerging technologies, told SDxCentral that it was “open season for what we’re willing to test and try”.
In particular, while TMO will no doubt continue to refine its Uncarrier propositions and slogans to attract consumers, it is clearly aiming to move beyond the race for the budget-conscious consumer mass market and to drive some higher value services and target customers into its model. This will be focused on using the core, with capabilities such as ultra-low latency and slicing, to enable high end services, such as mixed reality, for familiar consumer bases, and then to extend the same capabilities to enterprise customers.
That will enable TMO to make its first significant push into the enterprise and B2B space.
The 5G core is “the foundation you need, to unlock all these full capabilities of 5G that the other guys will not be able to do because they’re still anchored to LTE. They need to cut the apron strings to LTE to really unlock the capabilities. I think capabilities like really low-latency, highly reliable capabilities will only be unlocked once you have standalone 5G, and then that’s how we can scale all these capabilities,” Saw said.
The operator is working with large enterprises to identify opportunities and barriers for 5G, and to develop proof of concept tests in order to drive commercial services from 2022, though Saw believes the enterprise 5G market will really gather pace from 2024.
“Proof of concepts first, I think in the next few months, and then you’re going to start seeing commercial roll-out,” he said. “I’m optimistic when I say this, probably more optimistic than my business partners, because we have a strong 5G network today that I can test all these capabilities on right now.”
Network slicing will be key to make diverse enterprise requirements cost-effective for the carrier to deliver, while supporting optimal quality of experience for the customer, TMO argues. The firm is testing slicing, and the ability to provide enterprises with directly provisioned access to the TMO core, RAN and edge nodes. “5G is the catalyst. We can bring new capabilities like slicing with individualized quality of service as well as the seamless private-to-macro networking that enterprises need as they look at distributing their business everywhere,” Saw said.
As a small step towards its enterprise goals, TMO has announced one of its first specific B2B services, T-Mobile WFX. This consists of three solutions – T-Mobile Enterprise Unlimited, T-Mobile Home Office Internet and T-Mobile Collaborate, the latter a suite of mobile-first, cloud-based business tools.
“The old carriers are still using their 91% market share to feed business and government a very expensive starvation diet of old technologies, old plans and hidden fees,” said Mike Katz, EVP of T-Mobile for Business, in a statement. “With T-Mobile WFX a 5G network that is faster and covers more area than AT&T and Verizon, we’re on a mission to loosen the carriers’ death grip on enterprise customers, so we’re bringing that same disruptive, customer-first approach that made the Uncarrier the fastest-growing, most-loved consumer wireless company over the past seven years and counting.”
T-Mobile will offer its Home Office Internet to a coverage area of more than 60m households at launch and plans to cover more than 90m households by 2025. It starts at $90 per line per month, and Enterprise Unlimited with T-Mobile Collaborate together start at $37 per line per month.