AT&T partnered with US property developer JBG Smith to build a 5G network in a community near Washington, D.C. which it claimed would become the nation’s first full-scale smart city powered by the technology.

The companies signed a letter of intent to create a 5G smart city at National Landing, a 6.8 million square foot development near Arlington, Virginia. JBG Smith also has access to 7.2 million square feet of additional commercial, multi-family and retail development opportunities in the district.

AT&T plans to begin deploying network infrastructure in the first half of 2022. Plans call for an interconnected series of equipment installed on buildings, street furniture and underground, covering mmWave and sub-6GHz bands.

In a statement, AT&T added the smart city infrastructure will ultimately span both Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.

Northern Virginia is a hub for the defence and cybersecurity industries, and the operator aims to deploy equipment covering cloud and edge computing, IoT, AR and AI.

AT&T has cloud partnerships with Microsoft and Google, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) owns its largest concentration of infrastructure in Northern Virginia, operating 50 data centres in the region.

The AT&T smart city will be close to Amazon HQ2, a 4.8 million square foot secondary headquarters the e-commerce giant is building in Arlington, also in partnership with JBG Smith.