AT&T Says LTE Can Still Offer Speeds Up To 1 Gbps (dslreports.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via DSL Reports: ATT CTO Andre Fuetsch said at a telecom conference last week that the company's existing LTE network should be able to reach speeds of 1 Gbps before the standard ultimately gets overshadowed by faster 5G tech. The new 5G technology isn't expected to arrive until 2020 at the earliest, so LTE has a lot of time left as the predominant wireless connectivity. "There's a lot of focus on 5G -- but don't discount LTE," Fuetsch said. "LTE is still here. And LTE will be around for a long time. And LTE has also enormous potential in that, you'll be capable of supporting 1 gigabit speeds as well." 5G will help move past 1 Gbps speeds, while also providing significantly lower latency. "You'll see us sharing more about the trial activity we're doing," said Fuetsch. "Everything that's being [tested] right now is not standard, it's all sort of proprietary. But this is an important process to go through because this is how you learn and how it helps define standards."

Comments

The speeds are good enough!

[sims 2]

Now we just need to work on the price per GB.

Re:That just means

[dgatwood]

With a 3 GB data plan, gigabit data is good for what... 24 seconds? Awesome!

Re:That just means

[The-Ixian]

Assuming that your phone's hardware could keep up with it and that it could be delivered to you that fast by the sending end's infrastructure and everything in between... yes.

They *can*

[jxander]

ATT can offer speeds up to 1Gbps.

They won't, obviously... but they can

Re:Imaginary 5g

[supremebob]

Hey... it didn't stop AT&T from calling their old HSPA+ network "4G" before they finally upgraded their towers to LTE.

I guess that we can expect them to start promoting their "5G" "LTE+" network the next time they upgrade the backhaul on a few of their existing towers.

Re:Who cares?

[guruevi]

Real servers in real datacenters have no data counters. You pay for your peering and perhaps a minimum bandwidth and a burstable bandwidth. The "cloud" and consumer data services use the metric of data transfer limits and they are purely artificial intended to milk the consumer. You can't buy a 50GB/mo line because that's just not how the hardware works, you buy a line with a bandwidth measured in Mbps and most providers will then oversell that to their customers and if they run out, they buy more lines (or upgrade the hardware). You can't just upgrade a line from 500TB/mo to 1000TB/mo simply by giving money.