AT&T appears to be right on schedule -- earlier this year, the carrier said that it was planning to run these Austin test by the end of the year. Specifically, AT&T says it is interested in how this new network will stand up to streaming 4K video, but it'll also be testing a wide variety of office use cases including VPN, VoIP, "unified communications applications" and good old internet access. But 4K video is of particular interest, given how important video is to the mobile landscape.

It's worth noting that this test does not mean we're going to see 5G wireless technology any time soon. The standard hasn't been decided yet, which means we might get a repeat of the nonsense back-and-forth over what exactly "4G" means that we lived through in 2010 and 2011. The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?