AT&T’s key focuses are 5G, fiber and high-speed connectivity, Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said Friday at a Morgan Stanley virtual investor conference. While AT&T has deployed high-band spectrum in almost 40 cities, low band has proven more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. There has been “a dramatic shift in volumes into the suburban and into the rural areas, where our extensive … low-band spectrum holdings and our extensive towers and fiber footprint have really served us well and served our customers well,” he said. Millimeter wave is “only part of an integrated solution,” he said. COVID “provided a reassurance of the quality of the resilient products of broadband, wireless connectivity,” he said. But AT&T is still recovering. “It's challenged the media business, the closing of theaters,” he said: “The challenge with getting production completed and having to postpone or delay production.” AT&T is betting big on fiber, and not just broadband service to the home, he said. “I think about building a fiber plan that allows me to have backhaul for wireless, particularly when you think about some of the residential areas where traffic has grown substantially because you are working from home,” he said.

More than 60% of the 550 million 5G smartphones shipped in 2022 will sell for below $600, reported ABI Research Thursday. “More diverse and affordable 5G smartphones will be the main driver accelerating 5G adoption after 2021, with many lead vendors expected to push deeper into the segment, quickly democratizing the 5G experience.” More affordable 5G chipset platforms from Qualcomm, MediaTek and others will drive commoditization of handsets, said ABI: “5G at the high end will be squeezed.”

Online retailers need to invest in creative and innovative experiences “to capture revenue and offset lost sales from in-person shopping,” said Michele Dupre, Verizon Business vice president-sales, vertical markets, retail and hospitality. Verizon is working with retail partners on 5G-based technology using holograms, augmented and virtual reality, foot traffic analysis, computer vision and digital signage. Online retailers’ business is “booming,” said Verizon, citing an 82% spurt in data traffic the first week of November vs. a year ago and a 28% increase in mobile usage on payment sites. People are "moving to and around" malls 20% less than early November 2019 but 59% more than when COVID-19 restrictions peaked in April, it said.

T-Mobile will cover 40 million in the U.S. with 5G using its 2.5 GHz spectrum by the end of this week, with 100 million by the end of this year and 200 million by the end of 2021, said Neville Ray, president-technology, at a BCG/New Street Research conference Tuesday. “We have spent a long time leveling the playing field on coverage.” Midband 5G will give his carrier an advantage over AT&T and Verizon, he said. “That is where folks are going to see a really differentiated, high-capacity, high-speed performance layer,” he said: “They are going to see it from T-Mobile with broad coverage and ubiquitous coverage very, very fast.” No carrier could provide enough coverage to reach a broad market using high-band spectrum, he said. Millimeter wave has its place but will never “deliver a phone in your hand, wherever you go, with multi-GB speed,” he said: “It is mythical.” Ray said that when the pandemic started, he got nervous as some local governments shut down their permitting offices. Most have gone to online processing, he said. “They worked through the pandemic, work effectively with us, and so now I have this huge volume of permits.” Sprint integration should be mostly complete within two years, and changing over billing could take more time, he said. “We still have a lot of wood to chop.”

Midband spectrum will be the differentiator among carriers as 5G unfolds, with Verizon and AT&T likely to be the big spenders in the upcoming C-band auction, Wells Fargo’s Eric Luebchow told investors Monday. He forecast that Verizon will spend more than $21 billion in the auction, and AT&T $8 billion. T-Mobile “will likely continue to have after the C-band auction, the industry's leading sub-6 GHz portfolio,” he said. By the time the C band is built out, T-Mobile “will have a mid-band 5G network to the vast majority of the U.S.,” he said. Wells Fargo predicted Verizon’s share of the postpaid market will be steady at 43% over the next five years, while T-Mobile will increase its share from 28% to 31%, mostly at the expense of AT&T. “As they rapidly build out a nationwide 5G mid-band network, [T-Mobile] will be the predominant share-taker and only true ‘growth’ story in an otherwise mature marketplace,” Luebchow said.

Verizon Business plans a virtual event with Apple for global enterprise customers Thursday at 1 p.m. EST to showcase the iPhone 12 lineup. The companies will unveil an iPhone 12 offer for enterprises and bow new options for enterprise 5G, showing how Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband can be used in manufacturing, field service and healthcare, said the carrier Monday. Registration is available here.

Dish Network agreed to lease space on up to 20,000 Crown Castle towers, they said Monday. “DISH will receive certain fiber transport services and also have the option to utilize Crown Castle for pre-construction services,” the companies said. “The agreement encompasses leases on towers located nationwide, helping DISH facilitate its buildout of the first open, standalone and virtualized 5G network in the U.S.” New Street said the deal is positive for Crown Castle and the broader tower sector. Crown Castle has “30% of the US tower market, which could suggest that DISH intends to build to 65,000 towers if DISH’s network build is evenly distributed across the tower companies,” the firm told investors.

As Qualcomm starts to deploy 5G in the automotive sector over the next 12-18 months, “we are seeing really a complete overhaul in terms of how automakers are thinking about the connectivity portion of electronics in their vehicle,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president-general manager, automotive, at a virtual Deutsche Bank investor conference Wednesday. “The antennas have to be designed differently,” he said. “You basically have to have four different antenna elements for transmit and receive that requires the car design to change to be able to accommodate that type of capability. The location of where you put the modem becomes important because of the distance from the antenna.” The electronics need to be “closer to the roof line” to prevent signal loss, he said: “This is really a major architectural shift for a lot of different automakers.” That expands Qualcomm's role from the supplier of the semiconductors “to become kind of the adviser for the system platform for the automaker,” he said.

T-Mobile and OnePlus are sponsoring a virtual hunt for three pop-up stores located in the carrier’s U.S. 5G network with chances to win $5,000, a free OnePlus 8T+ 5G and OnePlus earbuds. Participants can sign up here for a chance to win one of 400 prizes. Hints will be given on Twitter. The promotion runs through Nov. 19.

Qualcomm Ventures is investing in four 5G startups, said a Tuesday news release: Celona, “an enterprise networking platform provider that brings 5G to enterprises”; Cellwize, an “enabler in mobile network automation and orchestration”; Azion, “an emerging provider of edge computing platform solutions”; and Pensando Systems, which is “pioneering the new edge services model of enterprise and cloud computing.” Qualcomm Ventures has invested to date more than $170 million “in the global 5G ecosystem.”