AT & T says 5G will restore importance to carrier phones – BGR

5G will debut in the field next year, according to everything we've heard. This means that 5G smartphones – hopefully, will be real smartphones, not just tablets we call phones – running on real mobile 5G networks to which subscribers can subscribe. The 5G promises much faster speeds and higher capacity, not to mention more consistent performance.

But according to AT & T vice president for radio networks and Gordon Mansfield device design, the arrival of 5G smartphones will have unintended consequences, at least in the short term. Talk to PC MagMansfield revealed that the unique requirements of 5G mean that initially, 5G smartphones will not be transferable between networks.

You know what it means: carrier devices are back, baby!

The bad news comes from the current fragmentation of 5G, in which all different operators will rely on different frequencies for their 5G signals. The hardware of smartphones, meanwhile, will not be advanced enough to easily support all frequencies of operators at the same time:

"It's not because there is no desire and we do not want to have cross-compatibility," explained Mansfield. It's just that no one has yet figured out how to integrate the 5 GHz to 5 GHz that Verizon and T-Mobile use, and AT & T at 39 GHz to 5 G, for the moment. And while T-Mobile and Verizon use similar 28 GHz bands, T-Mobile also puts the 5G on the 600 MHz band, which is not the case for Verizon.

This is the bad news. The good news is that Mansfield sees the problem solved in the near future. "As an industry, it will be quickly overcome; I do not think that the single-band introduction of the millimeter wave point of view will last very long, "he said.

More than anything, the problem highlights how long it will last until 5G is as standardized and ubiquitous as 4G LTE currently. Verizon launches the first "5G" commercial service next month in a handful of cities, but this is only a temporary fix: Verizon uses a proprietary version of 5G, and it will have to change all the hardware for versions in one year or two.