AT&T Q1 Reflects Fiber Growth, Fixed-Wireless Still Plays Crucial Role for Rural Americans

WASHINGTON, April 21, 2022 – During AT&T’s first quarter call on Thursday, CEO John Stankey noted the decline of older technologies as it expands its fiber builds and continues to invest in fixed-wireless.

During the call, AT&T Chief Financial Officer Pascal Desroches stated that even with the shutdown of 3G services, the company still had its best first quarter in more than a decade with 691,000 postpaid phone net adds and 965,000 postpaid net adds on its network. In the first quarter, AT&T fiber also gained 289,000 net adds, having brought the total AT&T fiber users up to 6.3 million (1.1 million more than Q1 of 2021).

While speaking to investors Thursday, Stankey emphasized that the demand for slower technologies like DSL and cable are continuing to fall. “We do not believe a product that is doing sub-100 [Mbps] is going to be a viable product in the market over the net couple of years based on how we are seeing consumers use the service,” Stankey said.

Similar sentiments have been shared by industry experts and broadband experts since over the past several years, though these assertions were echoed even louder during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the difference between those who could benefit from telehealth, telework, and distance learning services became even more pronounced.

Though fixed-wireless deployment strategies may not be able to deliver speeds as high as fiber, Stankey also did not rule them out. “There are clearly places in more rural areas where fixed wireless will be the best way to send bandwidth out to a customer,” he said. “We believe we can play in those spaces – there will be some former ADSL locations where fixed wireless will be a substantial step up and opportunity, and there [are] going to be places where the government comes in with subsidy in less densely populated areas that fixed-wireless is going to be the solution.”

He added that even though there might be other customers that may be best served by other “niche” broadband products, AT&T will not focus on marketing to these highly specific customers. “I think market performance of what we are able to do as we blanket an area with a robust fixed/fiber broadband service are showing in the numbers that we are putting up in our performance in the market right now.”

Consolidated revenues for the quarter were $38.1 billion with operating income of $5.9 billion.