The global pandemic hastened, in some cases overnight, the blurring of personal and professional boundaries, and some of those changes will endure long after the crisis ends, said AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch.

“Obviously what happened was everyone basically started working, started schooling from home, and all of a sudden we had to readjust our lives to work from home, learn from home, and all of a sudden we had to adapt very quickly to that,” he said at an investor conference this week. 

“Within our homes, we had to have these different personas that we normally don’t do — whether it’s doing your day job, performing that duty, helping your children get online so they can do their schooling, and then all the other things in life,” Fuetsch said. “That was a blurring, in a way, of these sort of enterprise and consumer segments coming together.”

When the first wave of COVID-19 infections hit in early spring, AT&T experienced a 20% surge in network traffic, a rate of growth that would typically occur over 12 to 18 months, and enterprise customers quickly initiated new strategies with the operator to better connect and secure employees that were forced to work from home, he said.

Those conversations with businesses later evolved into more long-term planning as many enterprises began to wonder how long the shift from office to home might endure, if not remain permanent altogether, Fuetsch said. 

That transition, and blending of work and personal responsibilities, also led to a dip in cellular-based traffic as millions of people hunkered down at home, he said, adding that 70% of the data consumed by smartphones actually occurs over WiFi broadband-connected networks. 

“Those are some of the big changes we see happening, and I would say those are the blurs between enterprise and consumer that you’re going to see more and more,” Fuetsch said.

The pandemic is also spurring the adoption curve of more advanced technologies that will eventually be enabled by 5G, according to Fuetsch. Spatial computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile edge computing are all developing rapidly to the realization of futuristic visions that were once relegated to science fiction or blockbuster films, allowing humans to interact with each other in new ways, he said.

“All of this technology is great, but at the end of it, we are humans and anything we can do to help facilitate [and] build better, stronger human connections” will benefit society at large, Fuetsch added. “This year we’re really getting pushed and challenged to do that. I really think this type of technology is just going to make things better.”

Some of these technologies, like AI, are already helping AT&T improve its operations, especially among its field technicians, he said, noting that AT&T’s entire routing and scheduling program relies heavily on AI.

“Any given day we have 35,000 network technicians driving around in trucks installing, and repairing, and maintaining our network. It’s essentially a very complex logistics algorithm and, as you can imagine with a company of our scale, just a single percentage improvement in efficiencies can lead to big, big dollars,” Fuetsch said. 

AT&T is also trialing the use of drones with computer vision analytics to help improve inspections of its roughly 70,000 cell sites. When those drones take flight, they are scanning towers, looking for excessive heat dissipation, corrosion, loose cables, and bird nests, among other signs that indicate a required repair.

“All of this is getting fed back into a neural network, which is basically AI based,” and that program identifies the repair checklist, the technician and skill sets required, and the parts needed to remedy the problem, Fuetsch said.

AT&T’s experiences here and elsewhere gives him confidence that “the camera is still and will be the killer app” for the foreseeable future. However, the use of cameras is undergoing dramatic changes, he said. 

“We carry about 400 petabytes a day across our network. About 50% of that traffic we carry is video traffic. Most of that is going out in a sort of downstream way. The future is going to be about upstream,” Fuetsch said. 

He envisions new applications that “can help better manage our lives through a simple video camera” with the aid of video analytics and sensing.

These advancements are occurring not just despite the scourge of COVID-19, but rather because of it in some ways as well, he said.

“This pandemic has really created some new norms here. I think the good news for operators is connectivity is so important and so relevant for everything we do,” Fuetsch said. 

“As we go into 2021, certainly with hopefully a light at the end of the tunnel here in terms of the pandemic with the latest news we’re hearing about vaccines, I’m actually very optimistic.”