AT&T planned to hit that milestone by 2025 but achieved it this year, she said. But as Johnson stressed, AT&T wants to get rid of copper in the remaining 500,000 square miles. “This is really good progress… however, without the full discontinuance of services across an entire wire center geography, we’re unable to stop the maintenance, repair, and attack the more fixed infrastructure costs,” she said.
Copper network degrading
Johnson said that AT&T is “seeing declining reliability with storms and increased copper theft. Copper simply does not do well with water and flooding, and repairs are very labor-intensive.” State regulators have said the declining reliability is largely AT&T’s fault. Many copper lines deteriorated because AT&T failed to do maintenance that would prevent lengthy outages and other troubles, a 2019 investigation by California state regulators found.
As noted earlier, AT&T said it plans to have no customers using copper in half of its territory by the end of 2027. In the other half, where AT&T described a “fiber first” strategy, there will nonetheless be copper customers who won’t get a fiber upgrade and will have to stop using copper by the end of 2029, Johnson said.
AT&T plans to build lots of fiber in the more populated half, but “not every customer location will be reached with fiber in these areas and we will still serve some of the customers in these areas with wireless alternatives,” Johnson said. AT&T’s “plan is to have no customer using copper services in these wire center areas by the end of 2029.”
The biggest beneficiaries of AT&T’s copper retirement may be shareholders. Johnson said the old network is an energy hog and has $6 billion in annual expenses. Overall, our legacy business is profitable today but the revenue declines are accelerating,” she said.
AT&T is selling copper after it is decommissioned and leasing out some unused central offices. “By targeting the complete customer transition in a wire center, with the least profitable wire centers first, we are able to remove these geographic costs and really optimize margins as we move towards exiting copper services,” Johnson said.
Besides the 45 million existing and planned fiber locations, AT&T said its total fiber footprint by 2029 will include another 5 million or so locations through Gigapower, a joint venture with Blackrock, and agreements with commercial open-access providers.
