- The headline news is that AT&T is boosting its goal to deploy fiber, now planning to pass 50 million locations by year-end 2029
- Perhaps more interesting is its plan to shut down its legacy copper network
- AT&T will use a new product called AT&T Phone Advanced
AT&T announced at its analyst day this week that it’s boosting its goal to deploy fiber, now intending to pass 50 million locations by the end of 2029. The company is simultaneously shutting down its old copper networks, and yesterday, a company executive spelled out just how AT&T is doing that.
First, Jeff McElfresh, AT&T’s chief operating officer, said the company will end this year with 29 million fiber locations passed. Then, for the next five years, it will pass an additional 3-million-plus locations each year, ultimately passing 45 million locations at the end of 2029.
“To get to an additional 5 million locations, we intend to expand our Gigapower commercial open access network relationships to reach more than 5 million locations,” said McElfresh. “That gets us to a total of 50 million plus.”
Previously, the company’s goal was to pass 30 million locations with fiber by the end of 2025. But it’s already closing in on that goal.
AT&T CEO John Stankey has been beating the fiber drum hard, and at yesterday’s analyst event he said fiber “is destined to be nearly ubiquitous because the physics says it will win. At the end of the day, fiber has better performance upstream, downstream, latency, resiliency, scalability and marginal costs, and it will win.”
Gary Bolton, president and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association, posted on LinkedIn: “With leading telecommunications providers like AT&T stating its clear commitment to fiber, I can’t imagine a better testimony on why fiber broadband is so critical to our nation’s future. Congratulations AT&T!”
Aside from the headline news about its new, bigger, better fiber-passing ambitions, an AT&T executive talked about the specific strategy the company is pursuing to retire its legacy copper network.
AT&T will use an interesting new phone to help shut down copper
Susan Johnson, general manager of Wireline Transformation and Supply Chain at AT&T, talked about the obvious problem that AT&T and other legacy phone companies are dealing with. “Only 5% of our residential customers are still using copper voice technology,” she said. “Right now, we are operating two parallel wireline networks: our copper network and our modern fiber network. The copper network is very inefficient.”
Now, the company is executing a plan to no longer provide copper-based services across the vast majority of its footprint by the end of 2029. The challenge is that there are still significant numbers of customers who rely on AT&T’s copper-based landline telephone service.
Johnson said AT&T has created “a new innovative product” called AT&T Phone Advanced. “It works just like a traditional landline phone, and it works with many of the services that our POTS landline customers are used to using: Think fax machines, medical monitoring devices, alarm systems, even elevators,” she said. “It connects over our wireless network or a broadband connection. Our AT&T Phone Advanced product is going to serve the vast majority of our existing copper-based customers.”
She did warn that there would be some areas where AT&T will have to work with its customers to move them to other technologies, including satellite or fixed wireless access (FWA). “But we’ve made a pledge that we’re going to keep our customers connected through the process and make sure that no customer loses access to voice or 911 services,” she said.
AT&T’s Phone Advanced sounds very similar to a product that Brightspeed is using. In September, Fierce Network spoke with Brightspeed CEO Tom Maguire, who said his company can still serve legacy copper customers with a landline phone service, even after the copper network is shut down.
The company is working with the big wireless providers to wholesale their 4G and 5G cellular networks. Brightspeed then deploys a special device in the customer’s home. It’s a simple device with an antenna, and customers can plug in their land-line phones. “It’s our device; we developed,” said Maguire. The device can provide either dial-tone for phone service or dial-tone and broadband.
For its part, AT&T is getting FCC approval for its AT&T Phone Advanced. The product was specifically designed to meet the FCC’s criteria as an adequate replacement for AT&T’s traditional landline phone service.
“We have successfully completed the testing with the FCC, and we are continuing to move through their preview process,” said Johnson.
AT&T’s wire centers
Johnson also talked about how the company is managing the retirement of copper across its network. “Our copper network includes 4,600 wire centers. We define a wire center as legacy equipment that’s in that central office, think voice switch, plus all of that outside plant – remote terminals, pedestals and copper lines that all connect back into that central office,” she said.
The path to transitioning customers from copper to fiber depends on the profitability of the wire center, she said. While many customers are moving off legacy copper services to fiber, AT&T must still maintain these wire centers. So, it’s developed an exit strategy to geographically focus on transitioning certain wire centers.
In areas with very low customer density, AT&T will turn wire centers into wireless centers.
“Wireless-first is the name for our wire center areas where we have not built and do not plan to build residential fiber,” she said. “This is about 50% of our land area. But it’s only about 10% of its population.” She said in these very low-density areas, AT&T will offer customers service with AT&T Phone Advanced, fixed wireless or satellite connectivity. “But the plan is to have no customers using copper services in these wire center areas by the end of 2027,” she said.
In other areas, which account for 50% of its land area but 90% of its population, AT&T plans to build fiber. These wire centers areas are focused on fiber-first. “In these areas we will be working to upgrade our customers to fiber,” said Johnson. “These migrations will be ongoing over the next five years. That is when we expect to have our fiber build to 45 million locations completed.”
Johnson said that earlier this year, AT&T gained FCC approval to stop all new copper-based new orders in 60 wire centers across 13 states. And that sets a good precedent to stop all copper inward orders.
California exempt
Johnson did note that California is not included in the plans she laid out for copper retirement. “We are continuing to work with policy makers to define our path in that state,” she said.
And she also specified that AT&T will honor the long-time contracts it has with its enterprise customers, particularly in the public sector.