3GPP Accelerating Standards for Mobile 5G, Says AT&T CTO

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) wireless standards body agreed to accelerate work on standards for 5G, allowing carriers to use 5G for mobile services as early as 2018, said Andre Fuetsch, AT&T chief technology officer, in a blog post. The new schedule is a year earlier than expected and 47 global operators and vendors already have signed off on the new 3GPP proposal, Fuetsch said Tuesday. Launch in 2018 “won’t be a moment too soon,” he wrote. About 137 petabytes of data traffic cross AT&T’s network on an average business day, up 250,000 percent since 2007, he said. “Video now makes up more than half of our mobile data traffic,” Fuetsch said. “Video traffic grew over 75 percent and smartphones drove almost 75 percent of our data traffic in the last year alone. 5G will be a critical part of staying ahead of that demand. While there are many elements to this new technology, the big news here is that you can expect to see the first standards-based mobile 5G services in 2 years or less.”