AT&T will be launching 5G across 12 cities on December 21, offering the Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot to select customers.
AT&T has announced the launch date of its 5G mobile network, with the network to go live on December 21 in parts of Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Louisville, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Raleigh, San Antonio, and Waco.
The network, which is 3GPP standards-based, will additionally go live across Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose in the first half of 2019.
For the service, AT&T is providing a Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot that uses the carrier’s advanced LTE and millimetre-wave (mmWave)-based 5G mobile network. Existing smartphones will be able to connect to the Netgear hotspot.
CTO Andre Fuetsch this week told ZDNet that the launch involved working alongside Ericsson, Qualcomm, and Netgear at a „dramatically accelerated“ timeline.
„We were pushing ourselves at speeds we’ve never done before, and the whole supply chain ecosystem that we’re working with, we’ve never worked this fast with them before,“ Fuetsch told ZDNet.
Some of the towers AT&T went live with were built just days ago, he said, compared to previously long cycle times with its older mobile networks. Fuetsch explained that for such a fast launch, everything had to be developed in parallel, which is why AT&T chose to work with just one vendor, one chipset manufacturer, and one device maker for the initial launch.
„When we sat down a year ago and said that we were going to get this launch by the end of 2018, we had to focus on one particular RAN vendor to make this happen, one particular device vendor, and one chip vendor.
