Facing pressure from an increasingly competitive wireless market, AT&T opened up about its 5G plans: It's aiming to field-test its 5G network in Austin, Texas, before the end of this year.
That's puts AT&T on pace with its biggest rival.
Verizon surprised the telecom world last year by saying it planned to start rolling out 5G by 2017 -- years earlier than industry experts had expected. AT&T initially resisted a me-too approach, declaring its rival's announcement as premature. The standards for what constitutes 5G won't even be set until 2018, the company noted.
But AT&T says it's ready to start sharing its 5G roadmap. It's working with Ericsson and Intel, and it will begin testing 5G in a lab this spring before testing it outdoors later in 2016.
AT&T expects that its 5G network will deliver speeds between 10 and 100 times faster than 4G. AT&T says that its new 5G network will also have significantly less lag between tapping a button and getting the network to play a video, download a song or search for a local restaurant.
With a network that fast and responsive, AT&T says that 5G will open the door to new wireless possibilities
New experiences like virtual reality, self-driving cars, robotics, smart cities and more are about to test networks like never before," said John Donovan, AT&T's chief strategy officer, in a statement. "5G will help make them a reality.
So if 5G is really going to be all that, why was AT&T resistant at first?
Because it really is premature to start making announcements about 5G. The true benefits of 5G won't really start appearing until 2020 for most of us, according to multiple people on a 5G panel held by the CTIA wireless association in Washington last week.