Oliver Haslam on August 18, 2016, 7:40 am

AT&T Collaborating With Tech Leaders To Speed Up 5G Rollout

Back in February, U.S. mobile carrier AT&T announced that it planned to begin testing of a new 5G service before the end of 2016, and the company has today made another announcement, which goes on to explain that it will be working with global industry leaders in order to ensure a wider 5G standard is created for a thorough, smoother rollout of the technology.

With 5G expected to provide data throughput speeds that could be 100 times faster than 4G, hopes are high that its implementation will see a new range of mobile devices and applications come to the fore.

AT&T intends to be there when 5G kicks off, and instead of jumping in now, it claims that the best course of action is to put tougher a proper standard, rather than plump for an interim standard and have the industry fight over interoperability.

The list of companies AT&T hopes to work with is a considerably lengthy one, with some of the industry’s biggest players expected to be involved. Preliminary discussions are said to be underway with the likes of “China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, KDDI, LG, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, INC., Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Samsung, SK Telecom, Telstra and Vodafone.” That covers both carriers and cellular chip makers as well as smartphone manufacturers. The only name missing that we would like to see involved is Apple. We, unfortunately, aren’t all that surprised, however.

AT&T is working with several global technology leaders and operators to align on 5G. The efforts are in preparation for the release of the official 3GPP specifications which will form the basis of the global standards. The goal is to enable faster 5G deployment once 3GPP completes the first release of the official specifications. An official technology standard makes the roll-out experience smoother which will help businesses and consumers get 5G technology even faster.

So folks, if you thought 4G was fast, you ain’t seen nothing yet!