AT&T Adds Broadband Subscribers in 2020 Third Quarter

AT&T reported third-quarter results that showed solid subscriber growth in the company’s market focus areas of wireless and fiber broadband. A record high 357,000 AT&T Fiber net adds and 158,000 total broadband net adds. "We added more than 350,000 fiber broadband customers and are on track to grow our fiber base by more than 25% this year," said CEO John Stankey. AT&T has 60 million customer locations in its landline region with about 25% of them having fiber access today. "We should be in a very unique position for every trench foot of fiber that we put in the ground of putting more traffic on that fiber and monetizing it more effectively than anybody else, given the breadth of the customer base that we serve, and the footprint that we serve." Stankey said AT&T has the opportunity to do some economic fill-in with its fiber deployments while also shortening the cycle from investment to cash, but it needs to be engineered the right way. "What I am trying to drive this business forward on is getting much more artful in our engineering to ensure that every trench foot of fiber that we're putting in, we are serving every segment as effectively as we can," he said. "When I am confident that we are actually engineering and executing in that fashion, I will step on the gas in a way that I think everybody will look at it to say 'Those returns are so darn good. Why wouldn't you do that?'