Dive Brief:
- AT&T announced Wednesday that it's working to gather a number of big-name mobile carriers and equipment vendors to collaborate on defining a standard for 5G.
- AT&T said its enlisted vendors including Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei Technologies, Qualcomm Technologies, Intel, Samsung, and LG, according to PCWorld. The company also wants to recruit China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telstra, and Vodafone to participate.
- 5G is expected to be available commercially in 2020, but standards would need to be developed much earlier than that.
Dive Insight:
AT&T said the new industry group would work to define the 5G standard, rather than wait for a bunch of different standards to be developed individually.
"Interim and fragmented pre-standard specifications can distract from the ultimate goal," Tom Keathley, AT&T’s senior vice president for wireless network architecture and design, said in a press release. "Linking trials to the standards process is the fastest path to large-scale global 5G deployment."
5G is expected to help enable broader use of IoT devices and smartphone users much faster connection speeds, among other things. AT&T's primary competitor, Verizon, is testing 5G technologies separately.
