John Donovan, the chief strategy officer for AT&T, spoke at the Mobile World Congress recently and said that the company was trying five different technologies for the last mile. This includes WLL (wireless local loop), G.Fast, 5G, AirGig and fiber-to-the-premise. He said the company would be examining the economics of all of different technologies. Let me look at each one, in relation to AT&T.

Wireless Local Loop (WLL). The technology uses the companies LTE bandwidth but utilizes a point-to-multipoint network configuration. By using a small dish on the house to receive the signal the company is getting better bandwidth than can be received from normal broadcast cellular. The company has been doing trials on various different versions of the technology for many years. But there are a few recent trials of the newest technology that AT&T will be using for much of its deployment in rural America as part of the CAF II plan. That plan requires the ISP to deliver at least 10/1 Mbps. AT&T says that the technology is delivering speeds of 15 to 25 Mbps. The company says that even at the edge of a cellular network that a customer can get 10 Mbps about 90% of the time.

G.Fast. This is a technology that uses high frequencies to put more bandwidth on telephone copper wire. Speeds are reported to be as high as 500 Mbps, but only for very short distances under 200 feet. AT&T recently announced a G.Fast trial in an apartment building in Minneapolis. The technology is also being tested by CenturyLink and Windstream. All of these trials are using existing telephone copper inside of existing apartment buildings to deliver broadband. So this is not really a last mile technology. AT&T brings fiber to the apartment complex and then uses G.Fast as an inside wire technology. If they find it to be reliable this would be a great alternative to rewiring apartments with fiber.

5G. AT&T recently announced a few trials of early 5G technologies in Austin. They are looking at several technology ideas such carrier aggregation (combining many frequencies). But these are just trials, and AT&T is one of the companies helping to test pre-5G ideas as part of the worldwide effort to define the 5G specifications. These are not tests of market-ready technologies, but are instead field trials for various concepts needed to make 5G work. There is no doubt that AT&T will eventually replace LTE wireless with 5G wireless, but that transition is still many years in the future. The company is claiming to be testing 5G for the press release benefits – but these are not tests of a viable last mile technology – just tests that are moving lab concepts to early field trials.

AirGig. This one remains a mystery. AT&T says it will begin trialing the technology later this year with two power companies. There has been a little bit of clarification of the technology since the initial press release. This is not a broadband over powerline technology – it’s completely wireless and is using the open lines-of-sight on top of power poles to create a clear path for millimeter wave radios. The company has also said that they don’t know yet which wireless technology will be used to go from the poles into the home – they said the whole range of licensed spectrum is under consideration including the LTE frequencies. And if that’s the case then the AirGig is a fiber-replacement, but the delivery to homes would be about the same as WLL.

FTTP. Donovan referred to fiber-to-the-home as a trial, but by now the company understands the economics of fiber. The company keeps stretching the truth a bit about their fiber deployments. The company keeps saying that they have deployed fiber to 4 million homes, with 8 million more coming in the next three years. But the fact is they have actually only passed the 4 million homes that they can market to as is disclosed on their own web site. The twelve million home target was something that was dictated by the FCC as part of the settlement allowing the company to buy DirecTV.

We don’t know how many fiber customers AT&T has. They are mostly marketing this to apartment buildings, although there are residential customers around the country saying they have it. But they have not sold big piles of fiber connections like Verizon FiOS. This can be seen by looking at the steady drop in total AT&T data customers – 16.03 million in 2014, 15.78 million in 2015 and 15.62 million at the end of the third quarter of 2016. AT&T’s fiber is not really priced to be super-competitive, except in markets where they compete with Google Fiber. Their normal prices elsewhere on fiber are $70 for 100 Mbps, $80 for 300 Mbps and $99 for a gigabit.