AT&T executives copped to its mobile realities, but the carrier's mid-band 5G strategy pales in comparison to T-Mobile US and Verizon. “We are the third-place player in wireless,” AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh said during the operator’s analyst event today.

“I want to be very transparent with that. We find ourselves not as the share leader, and it has been many years since we’ve actually grown our wireless premium postpaid business,” he said.

However, McElfresh and other AT&T brass believe its mobile business is repositioned for growth in metropolitan, suburban, and rural markets. The company’s leaders pointed to multiple segments where it intends to increase investment and fuel that growth in sports venues, retail, gaming, travel and transportation, fixed wireless for businesses, education, public safety, health care, security, and mobile edge computing.

Two major components of that push involve an expansion of AT&T’s fiber deployments and the deployment of its recently acquired C-band spectrum. The operator acquired licenses for 80 megahertz of mid-band spectrum in the recent auction and said it plans to begin deploying about 40 megahertz of those holdings by the end of 2021.

Capex for those activities in 2021 were already included in this year’s capex guidance of $18 billion, the company said, but it expects to increase annual capex by a cumulative $6 billion to $8 billion from 2022 to 2024 to deploy its mid-band 5G network.

AT&T said its new mid-band 5G network will reach up to 75 million people in 2022, and up to 100 million people in 2023. That’s a significantly smaller mid-band 5G footprint than what Verizon and T-Mobile US outlined in separate analyst events this week. 

To boost capacity on its 5G network and expand the footprint of its broadband network, AT&T also said it plans to increase its fiber network to an additional 3 million locations across 90 metropolitan areas this year. It also intends to push that fiber network to an additional 4 million locations in 2022.

“As we design our network and our offers in the market, you will see us densify our wireless network on the top of our investments in fiber. We choose to serve our customers that demand high-speed bandwidth with fiber and we will utilize our wireless networks to serve as other niche use cases in areas where fiber economics do not make sense,” McElfresh explained. 

AT&T CEO John Stankey described that fiber investment as a conscious decision to avoid the need to significantly densify its network and instead rely more heavily on a fiber backbone to fill in where needed, especially for indoor propagation and fixed use cases. A denser distributed fiber will allow AT&T to serve a mixed product set in multiple market segments, he said.

“We think that mid-band spectrum has its role. It has its role in being a premium mobility product, and we think there’s better ways to deal with what’s going on inside most of the walls of society,” Stankey explained. 

Pulling further on that thread, McElfresh noted that AT&T doesn’t believe the wireless or fixed broadband market is ubiquitous or best served by a single technology platform. “We’ll let the technology architecture, the serving architecture meet that demand or that need for that particular customer segment,” he said. 

“When you get up into the mid-band segment of spectrum, while it offers us really wide bandwidth for speed and capacity, it’s coverage characteristics don’t penetrate as effectively as the low band does,” he added. The operator does, however, expect to use its wireless infrastructure to sell fixed broadband service in rural areas.

More broadly, AT&T committed to expand its millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G network to 17 venues by the end of 2021, bringing its total footprint in that category to 40 locations. The operator’s mmWave network will also be deployed at an additional 7 airports and at least 30 company-owned stores. 

AT&T’s low-band 5G network currently covers 230 million U.S. residents in 14,000 cities and its mmWave 5G network is available in parts of 38 U.S. cities.