AT&T's deployment of EchoStar's lowband spectrum could take years

AT&T CEO John Stankey shed a bit more light on how quickly his company will be able to deploy the spectrum it's poised to acquire from EchoStar for $23 billion. The short of it is that AT&T will be able to roll out EchoStar's midband spectrum quickly, but it will take "a number of years" to deploy and light up EchoStar's lowband spectrum. Under the transaction, AT&T is set to acquire roughly 30MHz of nationwide 3.45GHz midband spectrum and about 20MHz of nationwide 600MHz lowband spectrum. Stankey said the midband is compatible with AT&T's network and could be deployed very rapidly and immediately be turned into revenues. If regulatory authorities give the go-ahead, it's possible that AT&T could start to turn up that spectrum even before the transaction closes by around mid-2026, he said. "Mid-band spectrum is virtually no lift at all for us," Stankey said. By comparison, the lowband spectrum "requires more work," given that AT&T currently does not manifest 600MHz on its mobile network.