AT&T voiced support for the decision last week by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) wireless standards body to accelerate some elements in the 5G new radio (NR) timeline.
AT&T said it now anticipates launching standards-based mobile 5G services to consumers starting as early as late 2018 — a year ahead of previously announced schedules.
The accelerated schedule includes a plan to complete key components of the 5G standards needed to start chipset development in December 2017. That’s 6 months ahead of the expected 3GPP full Release 15. These key components include the specifications for 5G NR along with the non-standalone option for the core network interface.
The 3GPP decision was backed by 47 global operators and vendors.
AT&T noted that about 137 petabytes of data traffic crosses its network on an average business day. Data traffic on its mobile network has grown more than 250,000% since 2007. Video now makes up more than half of its mobile data traffic. In fact, video traffic grew over 75% and smartphones drove almost 75% of data traffic in the last year alone.
