AT&T to Start Copper Retirement Process at 25 Percent of Wire Centers

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2025 – AT&T aims to start the process of retiring phone service at about a quarter of its wire centers in the coming weeks, the company’s CEO said Monday.

“Within the next few weeks, we will make detailed filings with the FCC to stop selling legacy products at about 1,300 wire centers,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said on the wireless giant’s earnings call. The company has about 4,600 wire centers, central offices to which old copper phone lines connect.

The large-scale filing is possible in part because AT&T got Federal Communications Commission approval in late December to use a product that connects to its wireless network as a landline replacement—the initial application was just for a few wire centers in Oklahoma, but approval set a favorable precedent for using the solution more widely.

Copper networks are costly to maintain and can’t provide competitive broadband speeds, but regulators don’t want swaths of rural and low-income households to also lose access to 911 and voice services. Incumbent providers need approval from the FCC and state utility regulators to take down copper, which usually hinges on showing they or another company will still provide voice service somehow.

AT&T’s newly approved replacement is intended to keep those essential services online so regulators will give the company the green light to rip up its copper.

The company’s planning to get most of its copper decommissioned by the end of 2029—California’s exempt from that plan for now, as state regulators declined AT&T’s bid to lift its carrier of last resort status. At an analyst day last month, executives said 90 percent of the population in its copper footprint will eventually get fiber, with the rest being limited to the landline replacement, fixed wireless, or satellite broadband.

Stankey reiterated that he thinks the company will have an ally in FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who’s favored a less stringent regulatory environment for ISPs.

“My expectations are, from the dialogue that’s occurring right now, that the administration is interested in finding approaches to scale these more rapidly,” he said of AT&T’s decommissioning requests.

Also, the company earlier this month entered into a sale-leaseback agreement with Reign Capital at 74 wire centers across the country.

Subscriber numbers

AT&T added 307,000 consumer fiber subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024—solidly beating Wall Street expectations of 259,000—for a total of more than 9.3 million nationwide.

Stankey said some pent up demand in the Southeast following a monthlong strike during the third quarter likely accounted for “a certain amount” of the fourth quarter total. 

Analysts said the strong fiber numbers were largely good news.

MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett noted, though, that as the company continues to expand its fiber footprint, which it has ambitious plans for, it will be building into less dense areas that might have lower returns.

“As density falls, cost per location passed rises. It’s as simple as that,” he wrote in an investor note after the call. “Notably, the rate of incremental passings is slowing, presumably reflecting the fact that there is now more labor (and time) required for each.”

The company also added 158,000 subscribers to its fixed wireless service, bringing the total to 635,000. That also came in higher than analysts were expecting. The service isn’t as big a part of AT&T’s mix as fixed wireless has been for the other mobile carriers, which both have millions of subscribers, but the company is largely using it as a means of keeping certain customers from switching while building out fiber.

AT&T reported 28.9 million fiber passings, an increase of 600,000 from the previous quarter and more than 2 million over the course of 2024. The company’s planning to hit 45 million by the end of 2029—translating to a pace of 3 million new passings per year—plus another 5 million from Gigapower, its joint venture with investment firm BlackRock.

New Street Research analysts wrote that they’ll be watching to see whether AT&T moves to buy up Lumen’s fiber arm, which had about 4.1 million passings as of Q3 2024. Analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote that the firm thinks AT&T would do so through Gigapower.