ATT FIBER to have 30 million addresses by end of 2025

Discussion from September 2021 CEO John S

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/09/21/att-ceo-john-stankeys-30m-locations-could-be-passed-by-fiber/

Brett Feldman: I believe your fiber network passes something around 15 million customer locations right now, you’re targeting to ultimately get to 30 million by 2025, that would still only be about half roughly half of the customer locations in the AT&T wireline footprint. Question we’ve gotten is how did you decide what the right target was? Why is it 30? And what really dictates the pace at which you build out fiber?

Stankey replied: Getting this kind of an engine (fiber optic build-out) ramped up to go from building 3 million to 4 million to 5 million homes (locations) past, working through the supply chain, all the logistics that are necessary to build network, it’s not a real simple undertaking. And as I’ve said, my goal is I feel very comfortable, we have places we can go to build 30 million homes (he really means residential and business locations combined) right now on an owned and operated basis, that have very attractive returns in the mid to upper teens. We’re demonstrating every day with our existing base, that we can operate that more effectively, we’ve now crossed over places where we have scale where we’re taking cost out of the business based on fiber replacement, the old infrastructure, we’re seeing that flow through in lower call rates, lower repair rates, better churn, all those things are going to continue to give us goodness moving forward.

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Do I think there’s a magic number of 30? No, I don’t. I think there’s a combination of things. One is unlike the investment base, to recognize the good work we’ve been doing. And then in fact, we are building and adding value back to our shareholders. And when they start to recognize that in the form of the equity in the stock, do I believe my credibility and the team’s credibility goes up? Yes, do I believe there’s going to be other opportunities for us to come out, as we hit those scaling metrics that we have in place, the supply chain metrics that we might be able to go in and say, there’s more that we could possibly attack, I’d love to be in that position to do that. And I’ve kind of put that out as a challenge to the management team to say the only thing that stands in the way between you doing 30 million and doing more is your execution and performance.

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But I’m not going to be happy until we have a 50:50 share split in places where there’s two capable broadband providers.

ATT currently is around 37 to 38% penetration, if desire is 50%… have 30+ million available by end 2025 would be 10+ million by same time with adding 1 million subscribers per year should yield 15+ million fiber subscribers by 2030 without any additional buildout. If the company adds another 15 million in 5 year fiber build out 2026 to 2030 should yield 45+ million passed with goal of 22+ million subscribers by 2038. 15 year fiber deployment with 23 years of adding accounts at rate around 1 million per year.

edit…. if I live that long would be 80 years old January 2038.