AT&T's AirGig Advances: Telephone Pole 5G Antennas Coming To USA

AT&T Labs-created AirGig telephone-pole-housed data access technology will be coming to the USA by the end of 2017. AT&T's first announcement of AirGig – or Project AirGig, as they call it – back in September of 2016. Back then it was suggested that first trials for this "broadband anywhere" system would likely start in the year 2017. Now is that time, and the places it'll come first are very vague – one inside the USA, one outside.

AT&T's messaging with this system focuses a lot on innovation, how they've been trying for a long time to get this solution right, and how at AT&T Labs they're creating things that haven't been made before. Basically they've made something they're super proud of and want to make sure that public perception is that it'd be crazy to not want these antennae sitting on top of telephone poles all around the United States.

AT&T engineers are attempting to work with mmWave technology and are proposing that their antennas be installed on the tops of power line poles. They suggest that installation of these antennas will be good for "Power Companies and others" because AT&T has the capability to keep an eye on the power lines to alert them to potential danger. Trees falling on power lines, and such.

The video below this paragraph promotes the idea that AT&T is the biggest and the best in the whole world at working with power lines and power poles. This video centers on AT&T's Construction and Engineering sector.

AT&T is also installing small cells with Centralized RAN (C-RAN) architecture in the city of San Francisco. These will appear as tiny metal boxes up poles of all sorts. These boxes will "densify" AT&T as a network and prepare the company for deployment of 5G in the near future.