AT&T CEO Sets Ambitious Goal With 50 Million Fiber Locations by 2029

AT&T CEO John Stankey has projected that the company will reach over 50 million fiber locations by the close of 2029, signaling his confidence in fiber becoming nearly ubiquitous by the decade’s end. Stankey, alongside other executives, shared details of the operator’s fiber strategy during an investor event held on December 3.

According to Stankey, approximately 45 million of these fiber passings will result from organic deployments, with the remaining 5 million coming from its Gigapower joint venture with BlackRock Alternatives and agreements with commercial open-access providers. He confirmed that AT&T is on track to reach 29 million fiber locations by the end of the year, noting that its deployment efforts began in the mid-1980s.

Stankey attributed the push for expanded fiber infrastructure to several factors, including a 70% increase in mobile bandwidth demand since 2020. He anticipated that data consumption would grow by another 80% over the next five years, driven by technologies such as AI, 4K streaming, user-generated content, and AR/VR applications.

He elaborated that the economic and business rationale for extending fiber directly to end users had become increasingly compelling. He predicted that by 2030, AT&T’s fiber rollout would be complete, marking a 45-year journey from inception to full deployment. While acknowledging that 45 years might seem lengthy, Stankey pointed out that this timeline is roughly half the time it took for copper networks to achieve similar distribution and customer reach.

Fiber, he explained, is central to AT&T’s plans to retire its copper assets. While technologies like RF and satellites have their roles, Stankey emphasized that fiber offers superior upstream and downstream performance, lower latency, greater resiliency, scalability, and more favorable marginal costs, making it the ultimate winner in network infrastructure.

He also predicted that future networks would not be categorized as fixed or mobile but would instead revolve around fiber, with various access technologies attached to it. This, he asserted, reflects the company’s vision of network convergence and market approach for the remainder of the decade.

AT&T also plans to expand its 5G network to cover more than 300 million PoPs by the end of 2025, with satellite technology covering most of the remaining areas. Additionally, the company intends to return over $40 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends over the next three years.

Capital investments are projected to remain steady at around $22 billion annually during this period. AT&T also aims to maintain a reserve of $10 billion to ensure financial flexibility for strategic growth investments, debt repayment, or further dividends and share buybacks.

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