- AT&T expects its Nokia-to-Ericsson swap to be about 80% done by year-end
- The carrier is using the overhaul to boost mid-band performance and energy efficiency
- Support for terrestrial and non-terrestrial network (NTN) integration is also underway
AT&T has been ripping Nokia gear out of its wireless network and replacing it with Ericsson, and it’s on track to have that job about 80% done by the end of this year, with the full swap done by early next year.
That’s according to Rob Soni, VP of RAN Technology at AT&T, who met with Fierce editors in Dallas last week. It just so happens that Soni spent more than 20 years of his career at Nokia before arriving at AT&T.
Soni’s been involved in a lot of swap activities over the years, mostly on the vendor side, and “this is the fastest I’ve ever seen anything go,” he said.
That’s probably because they didn’t wait for all the site approvals for a given cluster; instead, they’re doing the swap on a sector-by-sector basis. It’s sometimes referred internally as a “popcorn” approach, referring to the sector sites that are converted one by one over the course of the five-year network upgrade.
“We call it warm swap, as opposed to cold swap or hot swap, so that minimizes the risk overall to the customer,” he said.
AT&T’s Nokia gear is concentrated in the Northeast and western U.S., particularly southern California. For a while, both Nokia and Ericsson gear are running at the same time, in part to minimize the possibility of an outage.
Soni clarified that it’s not just a swap but a modernization, which means Ericsson equipment is also getting updated. Installing new, more modern radios gives AT&T better efficiencies both in the radios and in power.
Before the modernization, AT&T’s C-band and 3.45 GHz spectrum hadn’t been fully lit up. But last year, AT&T was able to lease EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum and deploy it in record time, rolling it out to nearly 23,000 cell sites in a matter of a few weeks.
“Now as we modernize, we put new radios up that fully exercise our entire mid-band capacity and capability,” he said.
Of course, all of this is being done as AT&T shifts to a network built on open RAN principles and adhering to the O-RAN Alliance specifications. To that end, AT&T is now installing open RAN-compliant small cells from 1Finity, a Fujitsu company, in New York City and Phoenix.
AT&T’s terrestrial and NTN
And who could forget about satellite connectivity? SpaceX’s record-setting IPO is set for this Friday, fueling even more hype around the direct-to-device (D2D) market.
For years, AT&T has been working on D2D with AST SpaceMobile, which is scaling its constellation to get 45 satellites up in the air by the end of this year. AST SpaceMobile completed the first voice call demo using AT&T spectrum in 2023.
Throughout its network modernization, AT&T is moving to support the interaction between the terrestrial network and the non-terrestrial network (NTN), Soni said.
“That has started,” he said. “We also will support some of the management of that layer through an RF interface between our terrestrial network and their non-terrestrial network.”
SpaceX’s Starlink enjoys a great time-to-market advantage, as it has thousands of satellites to support broadband and hundreds to support D2D. But it doesn’t (yet?) connect directly to the core of a terrestrial mobile network.
That’s an advantage for AT&T, as its network core communicates directly with AST SpaceMobile, resulting in better performance and less likelihood of a dropped call, according to AT&T.
Technical work re: JV
Last month, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon announced their intent to form a joint venture to work with D2D satellite providers on a unified platform. It’s largely seen as a defensive move to counteract SpaceX’s aggressive expansion into the mobile space.
Soni’s team expects to play a role in supporting the technical backend framework for that, but it’s unknown if there will need to be changes to the standards, such as through 3GPP.
“I think it's still early days for us to figure out if there's any standard changes that we'd want to do,” he said. “We’ll see where it lands.”