Now that AT&T has rolled out its C-band 5G network, things are slightly looking up for the wireless carrier. Many, however, found the rollout to be underwhelming. Despite this, AT&T still has a lot of deployment plans for 2023. The carrier has promised to improve its 5G service by 2023 and hopes to cover around 200 million people by then.
To see just how much of an improvement AT&T’s C-band 5G rollout has produced, PCMag has gone out for a test. And true enough, the reporters found “promising performance boosts” for the network compared to 4G.
The reporters also found that Verizon and T-Mobile still continue to take the lead in this.
Here are their key findings from the testing:
Verizon's new coverage map says it's blanketing more than 46 metro areas with C-band, AT&T only lists eight—and it doesn't have maps.
C-band offers the boost that AT&T needs. Download speeds on the C-band site were triple our average AT&T speeds in the rest of Chicago.
Low band 5G in Chicago didn’t give us any advantage over 4G performance compared to the boosts we saw from C-band 5G.
AT&T's 40MHz C-band channel is twice as big as the largest possible 4G channel, so it makes a real difference in performance. In comparison, Verizon uses 60MHz C-band channels and T-Mobile uses 100MHz, non-C-band.
AT&T is willing to let Verizon take the big C-band related headlines for now, while it plans to accelerate its buildout in the second half of 2022 and through 2023.
You can read more about the testing here.
Source: PCMag
