On Thursday, top executives from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon will be meeting with President Trump to talk 5G, according to a report out of Reuters. 5G isn’t expected to even be rolling out until at least 2020, but carriers are already testing it out in field tests and getting the groundwork put down for the future of wireless, which is 5G. Some of the names that will be attending this summit this week include Sprint’s CEO Marcelo Claure, who Tweeted about it earlier this week. As well as AT&T’s Randall Stephenson and Glen Post, CenturyLink’s CEO. T-Mobile noted that it would have “senior” executives at the White House this week, but the Un-Carrier refused to provide who specifically would be attending.
These executives will likely be joined by members of the FCC and Trump’s own Deputy Chief Technology Officer to talk about 5G. Trump is also meeting with a number of drone companies this week, to talk about 21st Century Technology, which is a big theme at the White House this week. On Monday, Trump had met with a number of other tech companies, including Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s CEO Larry Page and even Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, to name a few.
5G is the next evolution of the wireless network, and US carriers are going to need some help from the government to make it a reality. Since there are regulations already in place for spectrum and such, carriers will also need FCC approval for doing different 5G tests. In fact, Sprint had originally planned to do a 5G demo at the White House this week, according to an FCC application filed last week, which was declined and removed by the applicant, so it appears that it won’t be happening. While President Trump has been big on getting rid of regulations, and getting people back to work, he hasn’t been big on getting rid of regulation in the wireless space. Trump has said that the FCC does need to dial it back a bit, and only really regulate on spectrum, not on mergers and acquisitions, but then again, that was Trump as a candidate for President. His thoughts may have changed since taking office.