Crisis Innovation: Supporting an Unprecedented Network Surge While Still Building for the Future

2020 has demonstrated the resilience of our network plan we laid out over half a decade ago. And it’s given us all the motivation we could ever need to continue connecting Americans and first responders through FirstNet, fiber, 5G and more. We recently wrote a whitepaper titled “7 Principles of AT&T’s Network Transformation” that summarizes the next phase of our network journey. It’s a transformation that must start from the network edge – where customers actually connect to the network, such as over 5G or fiber – and extend to the network core with disaggregation and software-defined networking (SDN). Network function virtualization is also vital, and is similar to how gadgets have been replaced by apps on our phones. We are turning network equipment into software running on servers. Our Network Cloud embodies these principles and is at the heart of our 5G deployment. It is built on open source software which our developers helped create, including the Airship platform that powers it.