Exclusive Testing: AT&T's C-Band Triples 5G Speeds
What's better than 40MHz of brand-new 5G? 80MHz. That simple math might explain why AT&T is slow-rolling its 5G C-band launch right now, as we discovered in exclusive tests in Chicago.
Where Verizon says it's blanketing more than 46 metro areas with C-band, AT&T only lists eight—and it doesn't have maps. We got a tip about an AT&T C-band site on Chicago's South Side, so we decided to do a long drive to see how it works and what else we could stumble upon.
The good news is, C-band offers the boost that AT&T needs. Download speeds on the C-band site were triple our average AT&T speeds in the rest of Chicago, showing that once C-band "5G+" gets up and running, it will make a real difference.
AT&T's low-band 5G didn't give us any advantage over 4G/"5GE" the way C-band did. That's consistent with what we've seen in the past: AT&T's low-band 5G only uses 5MHz of spectrum, a very narrow channel. Our testing software, which shows how much data is being transmitted over each channel, showed only a very small amount of data transmitted over that low-band channel.
With C-band, things are different. AT&T's 40MHz C-band channel is twice as big as the largest possible 4G channel, so it makes a real difference in performance. T-Mobile's and Verizon's mid-band channels are even bigger right now. Verizon uses 60MHz C-band channels, while T-Mobile uses a straight 100MHz of its own, non-C-band mid-band, at least on our test drive. But AT&T has something else in the wings, which we'll get to shortly.
In terms of C-band site range, we saw something very encouraging. With a freestanding C-band tower high over a low-rise neighborhood, we started to get signal a full 1.3 miles away from the panel. That's huge! It's very different from our
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