Tag Archives: One Fiber

AT&T and Verizon Fiber

If you look at the annual reports or listen to the quarterly investor calls, you’d think that AT&T and Verizon’s entire future depends upon 5G. As I’ve written in several blogs, there doesn’t seem to be an immediate financial business case for 5G and the big carriers are going to have to figure out how to monetize 5G – something that’s going to take years. Meanwhile, both companies have been expanding their fiber footprints and aggressively adding fiber-based broadband customers.

According to the Leichtman Research Group, AT&T added only 34,000 net broadband customers in the first quarter of this year – not an impressive number when considering that they have 15.7 million broadband numbers. But the underlying story is more compelling. One the 1Q investor call, the company says they added 297,000 fiber customers during the first quarter, and the smaller net number recognizes the decline of DSL customers. The overall financial impact was a net gain of 8% for broadband revenues.

AT&T is starting to understand the dynamics of being a multimedia company in addition to being a wireless carrier and an ISP. According to John Stephens, the AT&T CFO, the company experiences little churn when they are able to sell fiber-based Internet, a video product and cellular service to a customer.

The company views its fiber business as a key part of its growth strategy. AT&T now passes over 20 million homes and businesses with fiber and is aggressively pushing fiber broadband. The company has also undergone an internal consolidation so that all fiber assets are available to every business unit. The company has been expanding its fiber footprint significantly for the last few years, but recently announced they are at the end of major fiber expansion. However, the company will continue to take advantage of the new fiber being built for the nationwide FirstNet network for first responders. In past years the company would have kept FirstNet fiber in its own silo and not gotten the full value out of the investment.

Verizon has a similar story. The company undertook an internal project they call One Fiber where every fiber asset of the company is made available to all Verizon business units. There were over a dozen Verizon business units with separate fiber networks in silos.

Verizon is currently taking advantage of the One Fiber plan for expanding its small cell site strategy. The company knows that small cell sites are vital for maintaining a quality cellular network and they are also still weighing how heavily to invest in 5G wireless loops that deliver wireless broadband in residential neighborhoods.

Verizon has also been quietly expanding its FiOS fiber footprint. The company has gotten regulatory approval to abandon the copper business in over 100 exchanges in the northeast where it operates FiOS. In those exchanges, the company will no longer connect customers to copper service and says they will eventually tear down the copper and become fully fiber-based. That strategy means filling in neighborhoods that were bypassed by FiOS when the network was first built 20 years ago.

Verizon is leading the pack in terms of new fiber construction. They say that are building over 1,000 route miles of fiber every month. This alone is having a big impact on the industry as everybody else is having a harder time locating fiber construction crews.

Verizon’s wireline revenues were down 4% in the first quarter of this year compared to 2018. The company expects to start benefitting from the aggressive fiber construction program and turn that trend around over the next few years. One of the most promising opportunities for the company is to start driving revenues in markets where it’s owned fiber but had never fully monetized the opportunity.

The main competitor for all of the fiber construction by both companies are the big cable companies. The big telcos have been losing broadband customers for years as the cable company broadband has been clobbering DSL. The two telcos are counting on their fiber products to be a fierce competitor to cable company broadband and the companies hope to start recapturing their lost market share. As an outsider I’ve wondered for years why they didn’t do this, and the easy answer was that both companies sunk most of their capital investments into wireless. Now they are seeing that 5G wireless needs fiber, and both companies have decided to capitalize on the new fiber by also selling landline broadband. It’s going to be an interesting battle to watch since both telcos still face the loss of huge numbers of DSL customers – but they are counting on fiber to position them well for the decades to come.

Verizon’s Case for 5G, Part 4

Ronan Dunne, an EVP and President of Verizon Wireless recently made Verizon’s case for aggressively pursuing 5G. This last blog in the series looks at Verizon’s claim that they are going to use 5G to offer residential broadband. The company has tested the technology over the last year and announced plans to soon introduce the technology into a number of cities.

I’ve been reading everything I can about Verizon and I think I finally figured out what they are up to. They have been saying that within a few years that they will make fixed 5G broadband available to millions of homes. One of the first cities they will be building is Sacramento. It’s clear that in order to offer fast speeds that each 5G transmitter will have to be fiber fed. To cover all neighborhoods in Sacramento would require building a lot of new fiber. Building new fiber is both expensive and time-consuming. And it’s still a head scratcher about how this might work in neighborhoods without poles where other utilities are underground.

Last week I read of an announcement by Lee Hick’s of Verizon for a new initiative called One Fiber. Like many large telecoms Verizon has numerous divisions that own fiber assets like the FiOS group, the wireless group and the old MCI business CLEC group. The new policy will consolidate all of this fiber under into a centralized system, making existing and new fiber available to every part of the business. It might be hard for people to believe, but within Verizon each of these groups managed their own fiber separately. Anybody who has ever worked with the big telcos understands what a colossal undertaking it will be to consolidate this.

Sharing existing fiber and new fiber builds among its various business units is the change that will unleash the potential for 5G deployment. My guess is that Verizon has eyed AT&T’s fiber the strategy and is copying the best parts of it. AT&T has quietly been extending its fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) network by extending fiber for short distances around the numerous existing fiber nodes in the AT&T network. A node on an AT&T fiber built to get to a cell tower or to a school is now also a candidate to function as a network node for FTTP. Using existing fiber wisely has allowed AT&T to claim they will soon be reaching over 12 million premises with fiber – without having to build a huge amount of new fiber.

Verizon’s One Fiber policy will enable them to emulate AT&T. Where AT&T has elected to build GPON fiber-to-the-premise, Verizon is going to try 5G wireless. They’ll deploy 5G cell sites at their existing fiber nodes where it makes financial sense. Verizon doesn’t have as extensive of a fiber network as AT&T and I’ve seen a few speculations that they might pass as many as 7 million premises with 5G within five years.

Verizon has been making claims about 5G that it can deliver gigabit speeds out to 3,000 feet. It might be able to do that in ideal conditions, but their technology is proprietary and nobody knows the real capabilities. One thing we know about all wireless technologies is that it’s temperamental and varies a lot by local conditions. The whole industry is waiting to the speeds and distances Verizon will really achieve with the first generation gear.

The company certainly has some work in front of it to pursue this philosophy. Not all fiber is the same and their existing fiber network probably has fibers of many sizes, ages and conditions using a wide range of electronics. After inventorying and consolidating control over the fiber they will have to upgrade electronics and backbone networks to enable the kind of bandwidth needed for 5G.

The Verizon 5G network is likely to consist of a series of cell sites serving small neighborhood circles – the size of the circle depending upon topography. This means the Verizon networks will  not likely be ubiquitous in big cities – they will reach out to whatever is in range of 5G cell sites placed on existing Verizon fiber. After the initial deployment, which is likely to take a number of years, the company will have to assess if building additional fiber makes economic sense. That determination will consider all of the Verizon departments and not just 5G.

I expect the company to follow the same philosophy they did when they built FiOS. They were disciplined and only built in places that met certain cost criteria. This resulted in a network that, even today, bring fiber to one block but not the one next door. FiOS fiber was largely built where Verizon could overlash fiber onto their telephone wires or drag fiber through existing conduits – I expect their 5G expansion to be just as disciplined.

The whole industry is dying to see what Verizon can really deliver with 5G in the wild. Even if it’s 100 Mbps broadband they will be a competitive alternative to the cable companies. If they can really deliver gigabit speeds to entire neighborhoods then will have shaken the industry. But in the end, if they stick to the One Fiber model and only deploy 5G where it’s affordable they will be bringing a broadband alternative to those that happen to live near their fiber nodes – and that will mean passing millions of homes and tens of millions.