AT&T’s Vision of Ultrafast Wireless Technology May Be a Mirage

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, has a vision for the future if regulators approve his company’s blockbuster bid for Time Warner. It goes like this: In a few years, your cellphone’s data connection will be so fast that you can download a television show in the blink of an eye and a movie in less than five seconds. (That compares with up to eight minutes now for a movie.) When that happens, Stephenson has suggested, you may as well just watch TV with your cellular connection and cancel your cable subscription.

Yet the vision may be a mirage. That is because 5G is unlikely to be deployed in any meaningful capacity in the next decade. The technology, which is supposed to offer connectivity at least 100 times faster than what is now available, is at the center of a bitter fight between carriers and telecom equipment makers about how it should work. No resolution is expected until at least 2020, said Bengt Nordstrom, co-founder of Northstream, a telecommunications consulting firm. “Anything before that will just be window dressing,” he said. Even after companies and telecommunications groups define 5G and how it should operate, they face the high cost of installing a wireless network capable of handling the fast wireless speeds. “They take a tremendous amount of money to build,” Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst, said of 5G networks. “The obvious question for AT&T is, where is the money going to come from to build out 5G networks on a large scale?”