AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have agreed to delay their 5G expansion plans a day after both rejected a U.S. government request to do so.

The request for both to delay their 5G rollouts came from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said in a letter that the planned 5G rollout would “result in widespread and unacceptable disruption as airplanes divert to other cities or flights are canceled.”

Allegedly, some of the bandwidth about to be used by AT&T and Verizon messes with plane communications systems in the U.S. More strangely, the proposal is one that initially came from France.

Jeannie Shiffer, deputy assistant administrator for FAA communications, said in a statement that “safety is the core of our mission and this guides all of our decisions.”

“The FAA thanks AT&T and Verizon for agreeing to a voluntary delay and for their proposed mitigations,” Shiffer added. “We look forward to using the additional time and space to reduce flight disruptions associated with this 5G deployment.”

Both AT&T and Verizon were somewhat sympathetic in their backdowns.

“We’ve agreed to a two-week delay which promises the certainty of bringing this nation our game-changing 5G network in January, delivered over America’s best and most reliable network,” Verizon said in a statement.

“At Secretary Buttigieg’s request, we have voluntarily agreed to one additional two-week delay of our deployment of C-Band 5G services,” AT&T said in their statement. “We also remain committed to the six-month protection zone mitigations we outlined in our letter. We know aviation safety and 5G can co-exist and we are confident further collaboration and technical assessment will allay any issues.”

It’s an interesting backdown given how vehement Verizon, in particular, was against the two-week delay. It’s also notable because different parts of the U.S. government disagree with each other. While the FAA was calling for the delay, the Federal Communications Commission was perfectly fine with the 5G rollout.

The FAA went as far as noting that more than 40 countries have launched 5G wireless services on the C-band spectrum without any aviation interference.

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