American Tower Sees 4G as Mobile’s ‘Underlying Foundation’ for 5-10 Years

Despite all of the buzz about 5G, American Tower’s “view” is 4G “will continue to serve as the primary network for most of us for quite some time,” Senior Director-Investor Relations Igor Khislavsky told a Raymond James investment conference Monday. For the next five to 10 years, “if not longer, 4G is still going to be the underlying foundation of most mobile networks,” he said. Expect 4G “to be enhanced with 5G applications over time, especially when you get into new types of use cases for 5G,” including edge computing, autonomous driving and augmented reality, he said. As new spectrum gets deployed in the 600 MHz and 2.5 GHz bands, “equipment that's utilizing that spectrum gets placed on our towers incrementally, and that's where we benefit,” he said. The year 2021 seems a “reasonable” forecast for when the industry will “start seeing some meaningful deployments” of 5G, said Khislavsky. “The standard-setting process for 5G actually isn't complete yet,” he said. “Once you see some 5G handsets in the marketplace, once you obviously see those standards being set," it will be "a fairly rapid deployment,” he said.