AT&T's Jason Inskeep on the evolving private wireless landscapeAT&T's Jason Inskeep on the evolving private wireless landscape

A private 5G test bed for the Texas A&M University System's Rellis Campus

For all these deployments, Inskeep explained that AT&T has had to assemble a diverse team to tackle all kinds of issues, whether that's financing, developer operations or technology.

"Each one of these [customers] is different," he said. "I firmly believe that I gotta be an ecosystem play. I have to be the best at what I do in my swim lane – which is network. I'm a network company."

Figure 1: An AT&T technician installs a 5G radio.
(Source: AT&T)

Inskeep said that, so far, AT&T has enjoyed significant traction in the industrial market for private wireless networks.

"Industrial is the easiest," he said. "That's where it's been the easiest conversation. They've had the most interest because they're at that digital transformation moment where they're trying to say, 'What's next?'"

Of course, AT&T isn't alone in targeting private wireless networking. A vast and growing array of companies are also hoping to tackle the same opportunity. AT&T's competitors include equipment providers like Ericsson, cloud computing companies such as Amazon, startups like Betacom and Celona and network operators such as Verizon. Indeed, Dish Network recently unveiled its own massive private wireless networking strategy.

It's dizzying, Inskeep agrees. And he said that's partly why AT&T is having so many conversations with customers on the topic.

"There are a lot of vendors in this space," he said, adding that customers are coming to him and saying, "'Jason, help me delineate which one is which ... Help me understand the difference between these different, disparate solutions.'"

Inskeep said that AT&T can act as either a prime integrator for a private wireless network or a partner to another company that is the primary customer contact.

"From our perspective, how we think about competition – we have spectrum," he said. "The finite resource in any wireless network is spectrum itself. So the ways that we can, from a LAN [local area network] perspective, maximize the spectrum and control opportunity for our customer, the better off we can give them scale over time."