Why AT&T Could Be The Big Winner at This Year's CES -- Barrons.com

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Why AT&T Could Be The Big Winner at This Year's CES -- Barrons.com
6:44 am ET January 8, 2020 (Dow Jones) Print
By Eric J. Savitz

The big winner at this year's CES might just be AT&T (ticker: T).

The giant tech show in Las Vegas is buzzing about the potential for 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless. AT&T and the other carriers are here and there are a variety of 5G phones on the convention center floor. But phones are just the start -- smart cities, autonomous driving, virtual reality, connected gaming all require high speed, low latency connections, i.e., 5G.

AT&T won't be the only winner, of courser. China is arguably ahead of the U.S. in rolling out service and spurring consumer interest in buying 5G phones. But in the U.S. market, AT&T is better positioned than Verizon (VZ), which is scrambling to find more spectrum. T-Mobile (TMUS) has spectrum, but the future of its spectrum remains uncertain, wrapped up with the fate of its pending bid for Sprint (S), while Dish Network (DISH) has spectrum, but no current wireless customers. In the recent squabble over how to auction so-called "c-band" spectrum now controlled by satellite service operators like Intelsat (I), Verizon was widely viewed as the most likely bidder. It could be the biggest loser from any delay in making that spectrum available for 5G networks.

AT&T isn't making any specific big news at the show this year -- their biggest announcement is a modest deal to build out a cutting edge 5G campus network at the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine at the University of Southern California. That's small potatoes, but it shows how AT&T is thinking about deploying 5G. It isn't just about new phones -- it's about providing new capabilities to businesses and the customers they serve. "We're bringing to life how 5G can transform individual businesses," Mo Katibeh, chief marketing officer for AT&T Business, said in an interview with Barron's.

For the last year, AT&T has been talking about how it sees three kinds of opportunities for 5G. It isn't just mobile, but also fixed wireless broadband (say offering Wi-Fi to restaurant or retail store customers) and edge computing. It's the latter where some of the really juicy stuff will happen.

Edge computing is tied to the notion of cloud computing -- but it takes the clouds and spreads it around, putting intelligence out on the far reaches of the network, for better analytics and decision-making. Katibeh thinks 2020 is the year "when edge computing becomes real."

For both mobile and edge applications, Katibeh thinks we'll see new killer applications, although just what they'll be is hard to predict. A decade ago, Katibeh recalls, he was running the AT&T engineering team building out the first markets for LTE,

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T drops a lot today.