5G technology will speed up everything with greater accuracy and enable the appearance of new services and products in various walks of life, but they will require a lot of support in fiber optic infrastructure and cellular antennas which AT&T lacks, so 5G The networks they will be the most wired in history and their deployment from now on will demand significant investment.
AT&T urgently needs fiber optic input to materialize the 5G traffic that its 21 million Mexican users will soon generate, along with their growing data consumption, and other companies’ customers who also use their network demand .
It needs to be cleaned up for the exclusive use of AT&T and its corporate customers, and one possibility for obtaining that fiber optic input lies in a separate unit of Telmex, the dominant company in the fixed telecommunications segment in Mexico.
A report by telecom equipment maker Ericsson warns that by 2027, 60% of mobile traffic will be generated from 5G networks and the remaining 40% from 4G-LTE. Ericsson believes that by 2027, 5G technology users will consume the equivalent of 41 gigabytes of data per month, up from the 11.4 gigabytes registered as a monthly average in 2021.
House Analysis Mason, specialized in technology, media and telecommunication services (abbreviated in English TMT), believes that 5G traffic in the US will grow at a compound rate of 27% between 2021 and 2026. In five years, Internet of Things applications (IoT or Internet-connected things, such as self-driving cars) will require ultra-fast mobile Internet and more augmented or virtual reality for large-scale and industrial consumption. According to Analytics Mason’s calculations, this would account for the increase in traffic.
That’s why AT&T is interested in operating at least one pair of fiber optic cables. It needs to manage that infrastructure directly, according to its own business strategies and degree of investment, not subject to lessee parameters that indicate how or when to light up so-called “dark fibers”.
Industry experts say that achieving this objective will be more feasible once Telmex has ceased to exist as a wholesale company.
AT&T’s Mexican operation suffers from this criterion, as its affiliate Telefónica Movistar also has a fiber optic infrastructure in Mexico, which it also leases to third parties through the High Quality Telecommunications Group (GTAC), which it owns. Made a decade ago with Televisa and Megacable. And for which all those companies have bet $134 million in investment to make it attractive to third companies.
“Fiber is not important: fiber optics is essential. The large capacity allowed by 5G networks will not be possible if the antennas are not connected to an optical fiber that has the same or greater capacity than the aerial segment. Otherwise, the antennas and transport network will become a bottleneck,” said Enrique Carrier, director of consulting firm Carrier y Asociados.
