AT&T has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test millimeter wave frequencies suitable for 5G in a number of bands, including 3.4 GHz to 4.2 GHz, 3.7 GHz to 4.2 GHz, 27.5 GHz to 2.835 GHz, 3.7 GHz to 3.86 GHz, 64 GHz to 71 GHz and 71 GHz to 76 GHz.
Any single one of those bands represents more bandwidth than AT&T presently is licensed to use for its mobile business. So 5G will represent an increase in available mobile bandwidth (as well as untethered bandwidth) ranging from 10 times to 100 times more than what presently is available. Adding small-cell architectures will boost potential usable bandwidth to perhaps 1,000 times today’s capacity.
Aside from those physical changes, it is possible, perhaps necessary, that service provider business models and revenue sources also change in major ways. As one example, it is possible or necessary that a majority of total revenue is earned from enterprise sources, not consumer accounts; from machine users, not human users.
With such huge increases in capacity, it might not be necessary to argue about access “fast lanes and slow lanes,” quality-assured, zero-rated or best-effort access, as there will be abundant capacity to support all those modes, simultaneously.
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