A recent article in Telecompetitor reports that analysts at Moffett Nathanson expect the big telcos to start making inroads into the near-monopoly for broadband currently enjoyed by the cable companies. The article focused specifically on AT&T, but some other big telcos like CenturyLink are also aggressively expanding fiber networks.

I would have to assume that the analysts got the following goals directly from AT&T because I can’t find any other references to these specific goals. But each of these is in line with statements made by AT&T executives over the last year. According to the article, AT&T broadband goals over the next few years are as follows:

• Offer broadband speeds below 50 Mbps to 30 million passings using DSL;
• Offer broadband speeds between 50 – 100 Mbps to 20 million passings using paired copper VDSL;
• Offer ‘near gigabit’ speeds to 10 million passings using via 5G wireless;
• Offer gigabit speeds using FTTH technology to 14 million residential passings and 8 million business passings.

The real news here is in the last two bullet points. AT&T accepted the goal from the FCC for passing 12.5 million customers with FTTH from the merger with DirecTV. It’s big news if they intend to extend that to 22 million passings. And the goal of using millimeter wave radios to reach another 10 million potential customers is something new.

If AT&T meets these goals they will be bringing serious competition to the cable companies. AT&T and the other telcos have been bleeding DSL customers for over a decade and handed the cable companies a near-monopoly on fast broadband in most urban and suburban markets. According to Moffett Nathanson the telco expansion will bring near-gigabit speeds on telco networks to 32% of the country.

It’s important to understand where the new AT&T broadband is being built. The majority of the new coverage is in three market niches – apartment buildings, new greenfield housing developments and business districts. AT&T’s expansion has largely focused on these specific market niches and is likely to continue to do so. AT&T is not proposing to duplicate what Verizon did with its FiOS network and bring broadband to older single family home neighborhoods. They are instead focusing on buildouts where the the cost of construction per customer is the lowest – the ultimate cherry-picking network.

This means that the AT&T coverage will bring the opportunity for gigabit broadband to a much larger footprint, but that’s not always going to bring customer choice. In the MDU market many landlords are still allowing only one ISP into their apartment complexes. As telcos like AT&T compete with the cable companies for this market the broadband speeds in apartments and condos will get much faster, but many customers will still only have the option to buy from whatever ISP that landlord has allowed.

I have to admit that this market shift to bring broadband to MDUs caught me a bit by surprise. Many years ago Verizon showed that there is a successful business plan for building fiber to older residential neighborhoods. In the northeast Verizon still carries significant market share in its FiOS neighborhoods, and customers consistently rate them as having better customer service than the cable companies. Other telcos like CenturyLink are copying the Verizon model and are building swaths of fiber in residential neighborhoods.

The traditional wisdom was that it is too costly to bring fast broadband to apartments. A decade ago bringing fiber to an apartment meant rewiring the whole building with fiber – and for many apartments that is prohibitively expensive. But there have been technology advances that have made this more feasible. For example, much of the ‘near-gigabit’ speeds can be achieved by using G.Fast technology over existing coaxial or telco cable in older apartments. There have also been big improvements for indoor fiber deployments that include small flexible fibers and techniques for installing fiber inconspicuously in hallways. Many buildings that seemed too costly to serve years ago now make economic sense. Finally, the potential to deliver backhaul to an MDU using millimeter wave radios is going to eliminate the need to build as much fiber.

The real big unknown is how successful any of these big companies will be with 5G. As I’ve been writing lately there are still a lot of barriers that might make it difficult for AT&T to use the wireless technology to cover 10 million passings. We’re going to have to wait to see some real deployments over the next few years to see if the technology works as promised and if the cost of deployment is as cheap as anticipated. But the one thing that these analysts have gotten right is that the big telcos are finally fighting back against the cable monopolies they helped to create by sticking with DSL too long. It’s going to be interesting to see how well they do in winning back customers that they lost over the last two decades.