The CEO of AT & T believes that 5G phone packages could be prioritized and priced according to the speed of data transmission

The next few years will see the deployment of 5G cell phone networks from companies such as Verizon, AT & T, Sprint and T-Mobile. It seems that the plans for 5G smartphones might not be priced in the same way as the current plans of the 4G LTE.

At the AT & T Results Conference today, AT & T CEO Randall Stephenson said (via The edge) think that pricing for 5G connectivity might look like domestic broadband pricing with different prices for different speed levels rather than a fixed price for the fastest connectivity available.

"I would be very surprised if, as we move into the wireless, the wireless charging regime does not look much like the pricing regime you see in fixed lines.If you can offer a transfer speed, some customers are willing to pay a premium for 500 megabytes at a speed of gig, and so on, so I guess that's the case, and we're in two or three years from now. "

The 5G networks are still in their infancy, so it remains to be seen how the pricing will ultimately end. It is also unclear how variable charging for multilevel speeds would work, since 5G connection speeds will vary depending on whether you are in a city or a more rural area.

The fastest 5G speeds, available via mmWave technology, will be limited to urban areas. Verizon Chief Executive Hans Vestberg said this week that the high-frequency millimeter wave spectrum was not suitable for wide coverage, a sentiment shared by T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray, who wrote an article on the subject. earlier this week.

This is a part of physics – the millimeter wave spectrum (mmWave) has great potential in terms of speed and capacity, but it does not move far from the cell site and does not penetrate at all into the materials. It will never really get past small pockets of 5G hot spots in dense urban environments.

AT & T has launched its 5G network on a handful of markets in the United States, and other operators, such as Verizon, have also begun rolling out their 5G network.

There are few smartphones capable of taking advantage of 5G networks at the present time, but other 5G smartphones are expected later in 2019.

According to rumors, the first iPhone 5G Apple will come out in 2020, when 5G networks will be more mature and more widely available. Apple is planning to use Qualcomm chips and perhaps Samsung now that Intel is no longer in the area of ​​5G smartphone modem chips.