AT&T picked long-time network equipment vendor Ericsson to provide dual-band radios to beam 600 MHz spectrum the carrier recently acquired as part of a premium-priced $23 billion spectrum deal with EchoStar.
The new Ericsson radios will include 8RX technology that supports increased uplink – or receive – capacity, which will be AT&T’s first implementation of this technology in support of its low-band spectrum resources. This was tied to the carrier’s increased support for AI traffic, which requires a more balanced need for uplink and downlink capacity.
The move also puts AT&T’s recently acquired 600 MHz spectrum into play, a band that CEO John Stankey admitted came at a premium price but is also key for the carrier’s AI-focused transport aspirations.
“We believe the best way to manage a robust upstream in an agentic environment is to have a really strong low-band position, and we already have an advantage low-band position in the market,” Stankey said during the carrier’s recent earnings call. “The 600 is going to make that advantage even more substantial, and because you can engineer the spectrum a little bit differently given how those bands are set up, we intend to try to engineer a really robust upstream network that reaches deep into buildings and has a lot of consistency to it. And we think that's what the low band is going to allow us to do.”
