AT&T 5G Deployment Across U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
AT&T* has delivered AT&T 5G capabilities across the entirety of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle in a public-private partnership with the VA. VA expects to pilot a variety of healthcare use cases with our 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) technologies to explore how they can improve healthcare delivery to the approximately 9 million Veterans who use VA healthcare services each year.
This is an industry-first deployment of 5G and MEC capabilities across the entirety of a VA health care and training facility. Multi-access edge computing is essentially a computer and cellular network architecture that brings real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to latency dependent mobile applications. 5G and MEC “holds the potential to be transformational by enabling new healthcare delivery and business models” according to Gartner1. Among the healthcare-focused use cases that could be piloted are:
- Mobile-to-mobile connectivity across/between medical devices, allowing the tracking of people and assets within the facility.
- Improved medical procedures and training through the use of emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
- Remote and virtual pain management using AR and VR.
- Remote and/or near real-time surgical assistance via the ability to layer multiple surgical techniques using AR.
The completed installation of a 5G Distributed Antenna System (DAS) for use with Sub6 GHz spectrum and other components needed to enable 5G. This 5G coverage extends to the recently opened Mental Health & Research building. We expect to deploy MEC and 5G millimeter wave spectrum and technologies in 2021, which will significantly boost speeds while improving latency.