Sixty-six billion dollars over the next three years. That’s AT&T’s new infrastructure plan, announced yesterday. It’s a bold commitment to extend fiber optics and 4G wireless to most of the country and thus dramatically expand the key platform for growth in the modern U.S. economy.
The company specifically will boost its capital investments by an additional $14 billion over previous estimates. This should enable coverage of 300 million Americans (around 97% of the population) with LTE wireless and 75% of AT&T’s residential service area with fast IP broadband. It’s adding 10,000 new cell towers, a thousand distributed antenna systems, and 40,000 “small cells” that augment and extend the wireless network to, for example, heavily trafficked public spaces. Also planned are fiber optic connections to an additional 1 million businesses.
As the company expands its fiber optic and wireless networks — to drive and accommodate the type of growth seen in the chart above — it will be retiring parts of its hundred-year-old copper telephone network. To do this, it will need cooperation from federal and state regulators. This is the end of phone network, the transition to all Internet, all the time, everywhere.
