AT&T’s silence on private LTE networks shows what a challenging market it is

[Commentary] It’s been two and a half years since AT&T and Nokia developed a private, secure, reliable and high-capacity LTE network for smart grid technology, and began selling it to utility companies and others. So far, AT&T doesn’t have anything to show for it.

At first glance, AT&T’s offering seems pretty compelling. The carrier is basically offering its unpaired 2.3 GHz WCS C and D Blocks to utilities and others so that can build their own, private LTE network. But the smart grid sales cycle appears to be fairly time-consuming; later in 2016, AT&T said it wouldn’t able to deploy its smart grid offering broadly enough to meet the Federal Communications Commission's WCS spectrum buildout deadlines, and asked for a waiver or modification of the deadline. Ken Rehbehn, principal analyst at Critical Communications Insights, explained that the private, licensed LTE sales cycle is exceedingly sluggish. After all, convincing a 100-year-old utility company to invest in a relatively new technology, and then to build out a network with that technology, doesn’t seem like an easy sell. Furthermore, newer technologies—3.5 GHz CBRS specifically—are muddying the discussion.