AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh this week fleshed out the telecom giant’s extensive fiber network expansion plans and how those plans dictate its 5G-based fixed-wireless access (FWA) deployments.

McElfresh told an audience at a J.P. Morgan investor conference this week that AT&T is currently on a fiber building boom that is the equivalent of deploying a new fiber connection between New York City and Los Angeles “in route miles every month.”

“When we say that we're a scaled fiber builder, we really are, and we know where the next property is that we're going to deploy fiber, whether it's on my network team, my own retail investment, which is the 3 million passings, or through our joint venture partnership, like you're aware of with Gigapower,” McElfresh said, referring to the joint venture agreement AT&T struck with venture capital firm BlackRock in late 2022.

McElfresh further touted those fiber deployment plans, which are the basis for AT&T’s recent refocus on the telecommunications space following a short-lived and very expensive foray into the entertainment space.

“Orchestrating this scale of a fiber construction program is one of the largest infrastructure programs in the country,” McElfresh said of AT&T’s plans to eventually pass 50 million locations with fiber by 2029. “It's heavy labor. It's heavy permitting. It's spread across 10,000 neighborhoods in a given day. I mean, it is a massive effort, and the women and men at AT&T are committed to keep that machine moving to achieve our vision.”

FWA feeds fiber

That machine also includes a 5G-based FWA appetizer. McElfresh shed that light when explaining AT&T’s “fixed-wireless playbook,” with a specific focus on how that playbook is dependent on and eventually supports the carrier’s extensive fiber plans.

“We know where that fiber is going and our ability to pre-seed that market with some fixed wireless, knowing that here in the next six months fiber is coming into a footprint area or catchment area, that's pretty nice to do,” McElfresh said. “We have that option as AT&T because we own and operate both sides of the network.”

McElfresh’s explanation continues what has been AT&T’s throughline on how it views the FWA space.

AT&T CEO John Stankey during the carrier’s most recent earnings call reiterated his view that FWA is a stop-gap for the carrier to catch customers as AT&T replaces legacy wired broadband technologies due to the inherit capacity demands of relying on wireless spectrum to support broadband capacity. However, Stankey did note that FWA continues to make more long-term sense for the enterprise space where network demands are more linear.

AT&T did manage to add a company record 181,000 FWA connections during the quarter, which Stankey attributed to AT&T having a better handle on how to deploy and manage the potentially network resource hungry offering.

“Our strategy overall around how we think about using fixed-wireless access has not changed,” Stankey said. “But what's happening is, I think you're seeing the learning benefits of focus. The business, in my estimation, has a much clearer point of view right now on the multi-year capital deployment and what we're doing and what footprints in terms of our investment.”

Fiber fight

That potential FWA success is also allowing AT&T to be more strategic in how it expands its fiber-based broadband network.

“It's not just about where you're deploying fiber and where you aren't, it's about what you need to do to make sure that you can transition out of legacy services so that you have the right infrastructure in place, whether it be wireless, fixed, to serve those customers,” Stankey said. “I think that clarity and the repeatability of that month in and month out is allowing all the organizations that are necessary to serve customers and sell product to get a lot better at what they're doing. And so we're moving up that learning curve of where we want to deploy our fixed-wireless muscle, all consistent with what I talked about before, which is we like to use it as a catch product from legacy broadband services that we're not going to invest in building fiber in. We'd like to use it as a holding product when we know we're going to be building fiber within a period of time, but we can provide a better solution or some market penetration on a converged basis until that fiber gets there.”

AT&T also continues to be linked to potential acquisition opportunities, most recently a deal to acquire Lumen Technologies' consumer fiber operations. Stankey would not bite on that rumor, but did say he was keeping “my mind open to something that I think can improve value for the shareholder that's clear and centered on what we have laid out as our key strategic thrust in the business and that's to be the best in connectivity.”

That potential fiber expansion comes as rivals Verizon and T-Mobile US continue to expand their own fiber footprints. The former is in the process of acquiring Frontier Communications for $20 billion, which will push its fiber footprint past more than 25 million locations, while the latter has aggressively moved into the space.