AT&T CFO Highlights Software Role in 5G

SDN combined with a surge in new technologies and untapped spectrum holdings are fueling considerable advances for AT&T’s network, CFO John Stephens said at Deutsche Bank’s Media, Internet and Telecom conference. The timing of new technologies coming online, the FirstNet contract win, an expansion of fiber, and 5G deployments just getting underway is translating to a “dramatic leapfrog” for AT&T’s mobile business, he said. “We are getting a 50 percent increase on average nationwide in our spectral capacity over a three-year period.” Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and four-way carrier aggregation are achieving new outcomes for AT&T that resolve many of the most challenging aspects of maintaining a network on multiple spectrum bands, he said. “What was challenging about our network before was that we had all the separate spectrum bands, we had all the separate highways, and now with carrier aggregations you can push them all together and use them as if they were one highway.”