AT&T Is Using an Advanced Video Game Feature to Improve Your Phone Coverage (www.cnet.com)

AT&T has unveiled Wireless Geo Modeler, a system that leverages ray tracing (the same technique used for realistic lighting in games) combined with machine learning to build detailed, dynamic maps of how radio waves travel through cityscapes. By treating radio propagation like high-frequency light, the model simulates collisions, reflections and occlusions from buildings, trees and other obstacles, ingests tower measurements, and runs ML-driven analyses to recommend or automatically enact network adjustments in near-real time—often in seconds or minutes. AT&T says the tool has been validated against field measurements, used at events like Coachella, and was developed over the past year to operate at the scale of thousands of sites. The move is significant because it brings GPU-style, physics-based simulation into operational telecom automation: operators can optimize antenna angles, compensate for offline towers, predict coverage holes where no direct measurements exist, and pre-position generators or cell-on-wheels ahead of storms. Technical implications include more autonomous, “self-healing” networks, faster mitigation during outages, and improved capacity planning for large gatherings. By scaling ray-traced propagation modeling with ML, AT&T can both react faster to disruptions and proactively allocate resources—improving resilience and user experience in congested or disaster-affected scenarios.