AT&T President of Network Chris Sambar says the “network is the killer app” and details 5G SA services
Killer application? We don’t need your killer application. Or rather … the network itself is the killer application, in that it enables multiple services and lets users do what they want.
Chris Sambar, AT&T’s network president, makes that argument in a new blog post summarizing some of the telco’s recent network developments, including its work on 5G Standalone.
“Over the last three years, our network has seen an annual 30% increase in traffic,” Sambar writes, adding the caveat that per-user traffic growth has actually been more than 30%. “This is the direct result of the pace of innovation and the changing needs of how people integrate technology into their everyday life. Our network is the new killer app and it’s paving the way for what’s next.
“Never in the history of our network have we seen so much traffic,” he continues, adding that AT&T is prepared to handle even more traffic and moving “thousands” of customers each day onto 5G SA. That includes users of its newly expanded Internet Air fixed wireless access service, which is served up via 5G SA; Sambar says that “in the not-too-distant future, 5G connected cars will ride on AT&T’s standalone 5G.” He also lays out the potential for network-slicing-based services that deliver specific quality-of-service guarantees and says that AT&T is “already working with customers – including healthcare, manufacturing, public sector and more – to address use cases with functionalities that require critical network access.”
While AT&T has always emphasized its infrastructure focus as central to its strategy, usually that means talking about fiber and wireless. Sambar declares that AT&T is “building more fiber than anyone”, with more than 60,000 miles built out last year and another 1 million+ location passings added this year; on wireless, he reports that AT&T”s midband 5G spectrum, including C-Band, now covers more than 175 million potential customers. But beyond terrestrial technologies, Sambar also now adds satellite to that mix, calling out the carrier’s recent testing and spectrum leasing deal with AST SpaceMobile —as Sambar sees it, 5G, fiber, and satellite are all a part of that network “killer app” as well.
