The recent team up between AT&T, Verizon and Tillman Infrastructure will see the construction of multiple cell towers across the US boosting the country’s overall communications infrastructure.
As part of the joint agreement, Tillman Infrastructure will build the cell towers to-suit with AT&T and Verizon as both the telecommunications firms agree to lease and co-anchor the co-located towers. Construction of the initial towers is slated to begin in Q1/2018.
Nicola Palmer, chief network officer for Verizon Wireless, said: "We continue to focus on technology innovation and investing in the latest software platforms to provide the best possible customer experience on our network. At the same time, it is imperative to reduce operating costs. We are reviewing all of our long-term contracts as they come up for renewal and we are excited to develop new vendor partners to diversify our infrastructure providers."
The two operators have been busy in other areas. AT&T announced the 5G Evolution mobile hotspot router at a time when consumers are in a hyping spree in terms of 5G. However, it is to be noted that the router has nothing to do with 5G as it is more of a 4.75G (4.5G is reserved for LTE-Advanced). The Netgear made mobile hotspot router features a 5,040mAh battery and allows as many as Wi-Fi 20 devices to connect to it.
Meanwhile, in the history of Gigabit LTE lab speeds testing Verizon, Ericsson and Qualcomm have established a new record with speeds of 1.07 Gbps. The speeds were achieved via the use of 12 simultaneous LTE streams, allowing up to a 20% rise in peak data rates in capacity, greater speed through Ericsson’s radio system and TLE software and a mobile test device based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X20 LTE modem.
