AT&T to spend $8 Billion on LTE expansion after T-Mobile deal

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that if the company's proposed $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile USA is approved by regulators, AT&T will spend $8 billion over three years to expand LTE coverage to 97 percent of Americans. In a wide-ranging interview at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Strategic Decisions Conference, Stephenson talked about the acquisition, AT&T's efforts to woo technology companies to support the deal, the company's LTE deployment and the future of the industry.

Stephenson said AT&T thinks it will be at least six years before the FCC can get a significant amount of spectrum into the market, which is why AT&T felt compelled to make the T-Mobile deal. He said AT&T's move to LTE is more about spectral efficiency and lower latency than simply boosting transmission speeds. He said AT&T is deploying 2,000 cell sites this year in its efforts to upgrade to the faster HSPA+ network technology. And though AT&T's LTE deployment trails significantly behind that of Verizon Wireless, Stephenson said AT&T is not worried about lagging Verizon. He said the two companies will be compete as fiercely over data speeds and network claims on LTE as they have on 3G. "That's going to be the fight," he said. "It's going to be the boxing match."