LAS VEGAS—AT&T is cementing its position as the first truly post-smartphone wireless carrier at CES this week, with a slew of announcements around smart health, smart cities and smart, well, everything but phones.

It's not that AT&T doesn't have phones. The company announced three new rugged Kyocera phones yesterday. But while AT&T is still the second-biggest wireless carrier in the nation, all of its postpaid growth last quarter was in things other than phones.

So AT&T didn't bring a phone manufacturer on stage at its developer summit here today—it brought Ericsson, to talk about smart cars and smart cities. And while this is a big deal for AT&T, and it may result in millions of devices getting little AT&T modules in them, there isn't much being announced today for individuals to buy.

Take smart health. AT&T announced a network-connected glucose meter, the YOFiMeter, which transmits blood sugar data to doctors, and a "remote patient monitoring" system that lets sick people take their own measurements and transmit them wirelessly to their doctors.

But the YOFiMeter needs FDA approval, and all of these e-health solutions require doctors to get on board. Complex government regulations (which predate Obamacare) around electronic medical records have made the whole medical IT area a slow-moving swamp of discontent, according to a recent editorial in FierceEMR.

Then there's smart cities. AT&T announced a complex alliance of a whole bunch of big players to get city services on line, with things like smart water and electricity meters, real-time infrastructure monitoring and gunfire-detection technology. Many of these things have existed for decades—I wrote about ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection technology, in 2000—but AT&T is trying to work on the painful task of knitting them all together into coherent systems with tools like a "Smart City Network Operation Center."

The benefit to AT&T is obvious: if it can get its own modules into every traffic light and trash can in Dallas, well, that's a lot of connections.

But once again, AT&T is attempting to move a huge, heavy ship that has a lot of different skippers. In the great longform piece "Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks," The Atlantic looks at the extreme difficulty of getting a hidebound city agency to upgrade 100-year-old technology without shutting down a 24-hour subway system.

I don't mean to be a complete downer about AT&T's efforts here. We're going to be hearing a lot about e-health and smart cities over the next few years, as we've been hearing about them for the past several years. But it's a slow build and a heavy lift to get there, and we may not see concrete results for several more years. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.