Even if you’ve only been casually following the progress and expansion of the biggest 5G networks stateside over the last couple of years, you’re probably well aware of AT&T’s early disadvantage in that crucial field when pitted against T-Mobile and now Verizon.
While Ma Bell did manage to beat Big Red to the “nationwide” 5G punch back in 2020, its recent C-band rollout was sure underwhelming (to say the least), placing America’s third-largest wireless service provider (by subscriber numbers) far behind the two top dogs in terms of “fast” 5G availability.
For what it’s worth, AT&T is obviously not ready to give up the fight for 5G supremacy just yet, setting some pretty lofty deployment goals… for next year. Technically, the carrier is promising to cover roughly 200 million people (at least in theory) with better-than-low-band 5G service by the end of 2023, which means a massive network expansion could take place at any point between now and 23 months down the line.
At the same time, however, its initial objective of bringing C-band 5G to at least 70 million Americans by the end of this year is no longer on the table. Ergo, AT&T‘s current plan designed to ultimately catch up to Verizon and T-Mobile will evidently need quite a bit more time to be successfully executed.
The problem is the competition will probably not just sit idly by while AT&T tries to recover all the lost ground from previous years. Verizon has its sights set on boosting the number of people (theoretically) covered by the 5G Ultra Wideband signal from around 100 million already to “more than” 175 mil “over 2022 and 2023.”
Then there’s T-Mobile’s towering Ultra Capacity 5G network, which is currently available for a whopping 200 million people across the US and heading for 300 million sometime next year.
Of course, competition is always a great thing for end users, and all these numbers could prove deceiving in the long run due among others to the core differences between the 5G technologies employed by the big three mobile network operators stateside.
Unlike T-Mo’s mid-band UC 5G signal, which relies almost entirely on 2.5 GHz spectrum, AT&T plans to deliver C-band technology situated between 3.7 and 4.2 GHz frequencies and a 5G flavor based on 3.45 GHz-3.55GHz spectrum simultaneously to the aforementioned 200 million people throughout 2022 and 2023.
At least on paper, the resulting speeds could well be higher than what Magenta is offering right now, thus potentially offsetting part of the availability disadvantage. But there are so many unknowns and question marks included in the US 5G equation today that it’s wise to simply not take any of the three carriers’ long-term goals and promises for granted.
