AT&T recently took the next step in the 5G hype race by announcing that it is releasing the first mobile 5G device. The announcement was made at end of the year to cover past AT&T announcements that the company would launch mobile 5G in 2018. The company can now say that they beat Verizon and Sprint to the market.
The AT&T announcement is referring to the device they are calling a puck. It’s a small Netgear modem that is being touted as a 5G mobile hotspot. The puck is based upon at least a few aspects of the 3GPP NR standard, allowing AT&T to claim it’s 5G. AT&T has not been fully forthcoming about how the device works. Where available the device will supposedly grab bandwidth from AT&T’s 5G cellular network – but since the 5G network is mostly still imaginary, in most places it will grab signal from the existing 4G LTE network. Within a home the puck will transmit WiFi, just like any other WiFi router.
There is no real product here. For at least three months AT&T will be giving away the puck and service for free to selected users. After that they’ve said the pricing will be $499 for the puck plus $70 monthly for bandwidth with an incredibly stingy 15 GB data cap. My prediction is that this product never makes it to market because it’s hard to envision anybody in an urban area willing to pay $70 a month such a small amount of WiFi bandwidth. The only market for the puck is possibly a few early adapters with money to burn who want to be able to say they owned the first 5G devices.
This announcement sets a new low for 5G hype. What I found most disturbing is that dozens of news sites picked up the story and basically spit back the AT&T press release and called it news. Those dozens of articles give the public the impression that 5G mobile is right around the corner, which is exactly what AT&T intended – they want the public to equate 5G and the AT&T brand name together. To be fair, there are several industry articles that didn’t buy into the AT&T hype.
The AT&T announcement also made this sound like a breakthrough technology by implying that this will deliver faster cellular speeds. There is a lot needed before there is a faster 5G cellular network. First, AT&T would need to install 5G transmitters on residential streets, requiring them to build neighborhood fiber networks. For the puck to work with millimeter wave spectrum AT&T would need to put a small antenna on the outside of a home to receive the signal since millimeter wave bandwidth won’t pass through the walls of a home. A network that will deliver residential millimeter wave cellular bandwidth is nearly identical to a network that would deliver 5G fixed broadband.
AT&T is not taking any of those needed steps. In fact, AT&T’s CTO Andre Fuetsch spent the fall repeatedly taking potshots at Verizon’s 5G deployment, saying that Verizon is making a mistake chasing the ‘fixed’ 5G market.
To further deflate this announcement, AT&T’s CFO John Stephens recently told AT&T investors to not expect any 5G revenues in 2019. He admitted it will take many years until there are enough 5G phones in the market to make a noticeable difference in revenues. It seems the only cellular carrier being truthful about 5G is T-Mobile which says it will begin introducing some 5G characteristics into their cell sites starting in 2020.
The bottom line is that AT&T just announced the release of a WiFi router that works off their 4G LTE network, but which supposedly will incorporate at least some aspects of the 3GPP NR standard. The company isn’t planning to charge for the product and it’s hard to envision anybody buying hotspot bandwidth at the prices they announced. But AT&T got what they wanted, which was dozens of news articles declaring that AT&T was the first to market with mobile 5G. I bet a decade from now that’s exactly what the Wikipedia article on 5G will say – and that’s all AT&T was really shooting for.