THE NEXT TECH FRONTIER
AT&T Communication CEO and Pittsburgh native John Donovan says without reliable network, you can forget self-driving cars
If autonomous vehicles are ever to become reality in Pittsburgh, a reliable 5G network will need to be at the heart.
The bedrock of autonomy isn’t independence but connectivity — real-time information being passed from one self-driving car to the next.
“When you talk about autonomous driving, a simple thing like kicking an orange barrel into the street is a problem,” said John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, a subsidiary of the Dallas, Texas-based telecommunications company. “It’s certainly a problem for subsequent cars. [With 5G], information that the first car has can work its way back to the other cars very effectively.”
That next-generation mobile internet connectivity — which will improve upon the current 4G LTE standard you’re used to seeing on a cell phone — will create the first real-time data network, Mr. Donovan said.
“With 5G, people don’t get why it’s so special,” said Mr. Donovan, who has been responsible for the company’s wireless and landline telecommunications; video service; satellite television, broadband; and more for just about one year. “But we’ve never experienced the capability of a real-time network,” he said.
So even though LTE is fast enough for you to download a movie at about one gigabit per second, it’s not fast enough to give robot cars superhuman reflexes — preventing accidents by transmitting real-time messages to other cars in a fleet.
And for the consumer, 5G’s remarkable, 10-gigabit-per-second speed will make it a breeze to download a high-definition film in seconds.
It’s not the first time that Mr. Donovan, a native of Brighton Heights, has seen the telecommunications industry turn itself inside out.
“It seems like every few years
Telecom turmoil
As a child, Mr. Donovan watched his father, an accountant for Port Authority, pore over financial news. The business pages of newspapers. Trade publications. The Wall Street Journal.
The pile stacked up inside the pale blue home where Mr. Donovan grew up on Sipe Street with 10 siblings. There’s still a hole in one of the glass windows that’s been there for decades, when he once shot a hockey puck at it.
During his childhood, Mr. Donovan said, he knew he wanted to be the person his dad read about in the magazines.
“I didn’t say, ‘ I’m a tinkerer and I want to be an engineer,’” he reflected during a visit back to his old home, which his family no longer owns, but where the neighbors still recognize him. “I got to college and said, ‘Hey, who does best in the placement office?’”
That turned out to be the engineers.
Mr. Donovan went on to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1982 before earning an MBA from the University ofMinnesota’s Carlson School ofManagement.
Telecommunications caught his eye because it was growing, dynamic, challenging. “There was so much turmoil,” he said.
He watched the divestiture of AT&T, when the corporation relinquished the Bell System — which had made AT&T a monopoly of the U.S. telephone industry at one time — and by 1984 broke it up into regional operating companies, called “baby bells,” that controlled local telephone service.
Startups galore were being funded in the telecommunications space for the first time, he said. Years later as the internet began taking off, services were moving from phones to data centers, and theheyday of dial-up arrived.
“The biggest challenges were really trying to move an industry from a phone company to a technology company,” he said.
Now, Mr. Donovan is at the heart of yet another shakeup at AT&T. The organization, as a whole, is not only eyeing 5G deployment, functioning as a mobile phone carrier and operating DirecTV, but in June it also closed an $85 billion deal to buy cable provider Time Warner.
Despite inheriting content creators like HBO and TNT to compete with the likes of Netflix and Google in the video and entertainment space, the company posted less-than-sunny quarterly results on Tuesday.
AT&T’s operational revenue for the second quarter was $39 billion, a decline of about 2.1 percent from 39.8 billion during the same period last year.
Mr. Donovan — who is not directly in charge of Time Warner, but will integrate some of the conglomerate’s media offerings in DirecTV packages — still has his eyes on propelling 5G technology forward and strategically deploying the network in particular regions, clustered by application.
On an average business day, he said, the AT&T network carries 150 petabytes of data traffic (one petabyte equals one million gigabytes). The traffic on its mobile network has grown 250,000 percent since 2007. By 2020, most of that traffic will be video, he said.
“Historically, we’ve tried to blanket the entire wireless network,” he said. “Because the greatest strength of this network will be its speed and latency, we’re going to find that it’s going to grow in big zones. So those zones will be built around use cases [like] autonomouscars.”
In networks, latency is a delay in processing time. With 5G in place, the needle will move lower on such lag time. When a network’s latency is so low that it’s virtually real-time, it can do things like control a car or a manufacturing line, Mr. Donovan said.
5G in Pittsburgh
Right now, the company is focusing on 5G in Austin, Texas with automated manufacturing in mind.
To reconfigure robots in a manufacturing plant for an update, or to change the machines’ application, a company must reprogram them, explained Mr. Donovan. Ideally, that would happen over a wireless network with minumum down time, to keep up production. If a company builds its campus near a 5G center, that’s plausible.
AT&Twill continue to roll out the new network over time, and Mr. Donovan thinks much of that can be accomplished by 2020.
In a place like Pittsburgh, self-driving cars are the most likely use case for 5G, something that the Pennsylvania Partnership for 5G — a group of businesses, governments, trade associations and nonprofits — really desires.
In an area of the city that’s bustling with people at night, you may build a zone with a high-speed internet connection where people can hail an autonomous car. Perhaps that’s the Strip District, or Lawrenceville; it’s a patch of the city that can serve as a testbed.
That high-speed connection will make it simpler to communicate, he said, enabling not just the smart home, but the smart city.