American telecom company AT&T recently announced its plans to launch a 5G wireless network with a maximum speed of 400Mbps in two US cities, namely Austin and Indianapolis, this year. AT&T claims that the company will be the first in the industry to launch a 5G network.

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According to various field tests by independent testing companies, the current 4G LTE networks used by customers offer far less than 30Mbps on downloads. One of the testing companies, OpenSignal, reported last year that AT&T had reached only 7.93 Mbps on 4G LTE for average downloads, based on thousands of measurements. Meanwhile, T-Mobile was the top performer with 12.26 Mbps.

Advantages of 5G

AT&T said that the massive bandwidth and low latency of 5G would help self-driving cars, mobile augmented reality, and virtual reality headsets. New technologies built on the top of the 5G network and greater density of wireless transmitters could bring the theoretical test speeds even higher - up to 1Gbps in 2017. 

In December 2016, AT&T launched its first business customer trial in Austin with Intel and Ericsson. The 5G rollout in Austin and Indianapolis is expected to occur "in coming months," said AT&T. The company also noted that it would build two new 5G testing labs this spring in Austin.

At an event in San Francisco, AT&T said that 5G is one of several parts of a technology platform called Indigo. John Donovan, AT&T's chief strategy officer for technology and operations, said that Indigo is like an operating system of the AT&T network because every network element will get more efficient using the Indigo approach.

Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics, said that AT&T's plans to introduce 5G in Austin and Indianapolis show that "AT&T is charging hard with 5G."

"I still think it is a neck-and-neck race with Verizon. But the key difference is that AT&T is pursuing standards-based 5G, while Verizon is pursuing pre-standards-based 5G," Entner said.