Airlines have warned that deployment of the new wireless service near airports would disrupt flight schedules this week.
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AT&T Inc. T 0.68% and Verizon Communications Inc. VZ 0.38% on Tuesday agreed to temporarily water down expansion plans for 5G wireless service to address air-safety regulators’ concerns about the network signals’ effect on aircraft instruments.
The new delay follows a last-minute appeal by the airline industry, which warned that restrictions designed to prevent interference with key aircraft equipment could force them to ground a large number of flights once the cellular service goes live as planned on Wednesday.
”At our sole discretion we have voluntarily agreed to temporarily defer turning on a limited number of towers around certain airport runways,” an AT&T spokeswoman said in a statement. “We are launching our advanced 5G services everywhere else as planned.”
Verizon followed AT&T’s move later Tuesday and committed to voluntarily limit its 5G network around airports. The carrier said its Wednesday 5G launch will still cover more than 90 million Americans.
The cellphone carriers’ next-generation wireless upgrades have sat in limbo in recent months after the Federal Aviation Administration asked them to pause their 5G rollouts. The aerospace regulator said the frequencies AT&T and Verizon planned to use to carry the new 5G signals might confuse radar altimeters, which aircraft depend on to measure height off the ground.
Telecom-industry executives have disputed those claims and said that 5G service already operates in similar frequencies in dozens of other countries.
The telecom and aviation industries seemed on the brink of a truce earlier this month after cellphone carriers agreed to completely pause the launch of their new 5G services until Jan. 19. The timeout was designed to give the Federal Aviation Administration more time to whittle down its safety restrictions to specific aircraft and airports, which would lessen the disruption they caused to flight plans.
But the FAA in recent days informed airlines that many airports expected to get some relief from the safety restrictions would still face sharp limits on landings in harsh weather. Top passenger and cargo airline executives on Monday wrote Biden administration officials with another delay request, warning that the federal safety precautions could ground swaths of their fleets without more protection from 5G signals.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at [email protected]
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