AT&T Debuts the 5G Innovation Studio

What's the goal?

In this space, we'll work with customers and industry collaborators to ideate, test and validate new 5G-centric applications across a variety of industries.

One of the biggest benefits of 5G will be the reduction of latency, the increase in bandwidth and the overall reliability of the network. The studio will harness these network enhancements to improve consumer and business experiences. This includes technologies such as on-premise edge compute (MEC) and edge compute at the network edge (ANE) that when combined with 5G will bring new experiences to life.

We recently worked with Microsoft and the drone company EVA to deploy a test environment representative of our Microsoft Azure Edge Zone with AT&T. The environment, enabled by AT&T Network Edge, was equipped with cloud services including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host EVA's drone command control application. The low latency of 5G combined with EVA's app deployed at the network edge on Azure enabled autonomous drone control beyond visual line of sight. This proof of concept, along with ease of network and cloud scalability, demonstrates how AT&T and Microsoft's technologies will enable the future of drone delivery in metro areas.

We're also working to bring science fiction to reality - like holographic communication. We're building on the success of our NBA holographic interviews during the 2020 playoffs with HoloVision and exploring new ways to enable immersive holographic experiences powered by AT&T 5G.

Additionally, the promise of 5G allows for an unprecedented amount of customization, giving us the opportunity to directly tune the network for very specific needs. This level of customization makes the impossible not only possible, but also probable. At the same time, we'll remain focused on ensuring that this perpetual innovation doesn't take away from but enhances the outstanding performance users expect on the network.

Examples might include cloud gaming with a network slice for consumers and our edge strategy to deliver our best performance for the gaming platform.