Lindner: AT&T's Backhaul +500% in 2011

[Commentary] AT&T Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner said, "We expect 65%, 70% of our traffic to be covered under fiber backhaul as we get towards the end of '11. We're in the low to mid-20s in terms of deployment currently." That kind of improvement could handle most, if not all, of AT&T's network capacity problems.

The typical 3G cell site is today served with T-1's, often 4-5 T-1's with 6-8 megabit capacity. AT&T's fiber is based on Gig-E's, with 100 meg a typical provision. That's about a 13x increase for almost half the network, which represents about a 500% increase in total network capacity. That's on top of a 2-4x increase in the last two years, yielding a 2009-2012 increase in tower backhaul of probably 2,000%. The Gig-E's can be upped to 200 and 300 meg without any construction (i.e. very cheaply and quickly).