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AT&T Shares 5G Trial Progress, Reports Gigabit Speeds and 9ms Latency

in News, 5G, AT&T, mmWave, LTE
AT&T

AT&T has released some ongoing 5G trial details earlier this week. The company had started enterprise 5G trial in Austin, Texas more than a year ago to explore mmWave and testing 5G equipment and later expanded 5G trials to more places in Waco, Texas, Kalamazoo, Michigan and South Bend, Indiana.

AT&T has reported following key findings and observation

  • Provided 5G mmWave service to a retail location more than 150 meters away from the cell site and observed wireless speeds of approximately 1.2 Gbps in a 400 MHz channel.
  • Observed latency rates at 9-12 milliseconds.
  • Latency impacts things like the time between pressing play and seeing a video start to stream or hitting a web link and seeing a webpage begin to load. For context, MIT researchers discovered the human brain “latency” is 13 milliseconds.
  • Observed no impacts on 5G mmWave signal performance due to rain, snow or other weather events.
  • Learned mmWave signals can penetrate materials such as significant foliage, glass and even walls better than initially anticipated.
  • Observed more than 1 Gbps speeds under line of sight conditions up to 900 feet.

During this period, AT&T worked with a variety of customers in different parts of the country to conduct these trials to see how 5G and mmWave worked in every type of environment—for every type of customer and plans to utilize trial learnings for its commercial 5G launches later this year.

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