AT&T to Chop Copper Networks

AT&T announced that it has plans to cut its copper network footprint in half by 2025. However, Jeff McElfish, the CEO of AST&T’s Communications division, said the company isn’t planning to forcibly move customers off copper as they decommission copper. According to McElfish, customers are naturally migrating off copper. I find that hard to believe. CCG Consulting is still seeing DSL penetration rates in cities between 10 percent and 40 percent. Our surveys indicate that the people who are staying with DSL are doing so because of price – they largely hate DSL performance, but it’s what they can afford. McElfish said AT&T plans to have 75 percent of its footprint covered by fiber or fixed cellular wireless by 2025. With today’s 4G LTE technology that’s been branded as 5G, AT&T is not prepared to deliver fixed cellular broadband to huge numbers of people in cities. Even when AT&T finally implements real 5G (estimated to be 5 – 7 years in the future), the company would have to install a huge number of small cell sites to have enough broadband capacity to migrate DSL customers to fixed cellular broadband. And that means building more fiber deep into neighborhoods to serve the small cell sites. None of that is happening by 2025, so AT&T must be planning on turning down rural copper markets first. AT&T is ultimately going to have to force people off DSL. I don’t see millions of people voluntarily abandoning the product so that AT&T can tear down the copper without a public stir.

[Doug Dawson is President of CCG Consulting.]