AT&T has lit up a major upgrade to its 5G network that you may not notice on your phone immediately, but which may already have improved service to your Apple Watch. It should also unlock non-trivial improvements to its overall wireless service.

The nationwide standalone 5G that the carrier announced Wednesday essentially unchains that service from 4G LTE, allowing devices to connect to the network without first requiring a setup via AT&T’s older and slower network.

“Today, select services on our network already use 5G SA coast-to-coast,” says Yigal Elbaz, SVP and Network CTO. “We have millions of customers already on our 5G SA network, and we’re expanding availability to more customers as device support and provisioning allow.”

The Dallas-based firm is rolling out standalone 5G across both its slower but farther-ranging low-band 5G as well as the much faster C-band and short-range millimeter-wave connectivity that it advertises together as “5G+.”

The carrier already activated one standalone-based upgrade in July, Reduced Capability, RedCap for short, a lower-power version designed for connected gadgets that don’t need peak bandwidth. AT&T is now using that to provide service to Apple’s new Apple Watch Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.

As T-Mobile showed after its 2020 launch of standalone 5G, eliminating the need for a 4G underpinning can allow network tweaks to improve the range of low-band 5G and boost the speed of higher-band 5G.

But standalone also enables “network slicing," discrete services with their own performance profiles. Since turning on network slicing in 2023, T-Mobile has used that technology to deploy a T-Priority service for first responders and start selling a SuperMobile tier for businesses.

AT&T is now in a position to move network slices out of its research labs and into the market. But Elbaz doesn’t mention slicing and instead vaguely touts “significant advantages for our customers and partners” and “the next wave of innovation, creativity, and connection.”

As for Verizon, the carrier has yet to make a formal announcement of standalone availability but says it has reached about the same stage of rollout as AT&T. “Verizon’s 5G Standalone network is deployed nationwide,” spokeswoman Christina Moon Ashraf emailed Wednesday. “We're not 100% complete yet, but the vast majority of 5G SA capable phones will connect to 5G SA in the vast majority of places.”

As at AT&T, this isn’t a band-specific deployment.

Unlike AT&T, Verizon is already offering network-slice options: Enhanced Video Calling, announced in December, and Frontline service for first responders, launched in April and rolled out nationwide in June.

By: DocMemory
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