AT&T raises forecast for midband POPs, sees sturdy 5G-driven revenues

Service’s service revenues have been up 5.6% year-over-year, AT&T confirms that it already has stay 5G SA

AT&T reported sturdy third-quarter outcomes and stated that its midband 5G spectrum roll-out is going on quicker than anticipated. The service began off anticipating to cowl 70 million potential clients with C-Band spectrum in 2022, nevertheless it has bumped that quantity up twice now: First to 100 million, now to greater than 130 million POPs.

That is because of a mix of being conservative on setting its expectations in case provide chain points have been an issue and good execution on community deployment plans, plus the efficiency of large MIMO radios and better-than-expected propagation of C-Band spectrum, defined Chris Sambar, AT&T EVP of community know-how, on a name with journalists this morning. He additionally confirmed that AT&T has a stay 5G Standalone core which is already carrying visitors for business clients.

Because it will increase its protection of potential clients, AT&T is seeing income development pushed by 5G plan and handset uptake. The service reported that its service revenues have been at $15.3 billion for the quarter, up 5.6% year-over-year, whereas gear revenues elevated 7.2% pushed by “elevated gross sales and mixture of higher-priced smartphones.”

So far as buyer figures, AT&T reported:

-Postpaid web additions of 964,000, together with 708,000 postpaid telephone web provides, 26,000 postpaid tablets or different computing units, and 230,000 “different” web provides.

-Pay as you go telephone web additions of 108,000, with pay as you go churn at lower than 3%, and Cricket-specific churn “considerably decrease”.

-A FirstNet connection base of about 4 million throughout greater than 23,000 companies.

-IoT connections on the AT&T community have now reached greater than 100 million, the service stated, including that it’s the first U.S. service to hit that determine. AT&T famous that it has added greater than 1 million related automobiles to its community for 30 consecutive quarters.

“Our outcomes present our technique is resonating with clients as we proceed to see strong ranges of postpaid telephone web provides and strategy 1 million AT&T Fiber web provides for the yr,” stated AT&T CEO John Stankey. “Our disciplined go-to-market strategy helps drive wholesome subscriber development with high-quality clients. … We stay assured in our potential to attain, or surpass, all our monetary commitments for the yr.”

Enterprise wireline revenues have been down 4.5% year-over-year on decrease demand for legacy voice and knowledge merchandise, the operator reported, and its shopper wireline unit noticed revenues develop 1.4% to $3.2 billion. However fiber fueled broadband revenues that have been up 6.1%, though non-fiber revenues have been down about 12%.

Requested concerning the service’s technique on transitioning to 5G Standalone and its information earlier this week that it’s implementing 5G SA regional cores to assist edge computing, Sambar responded that AT&T hasn’t wanted 5G SA initially, as a result of “the use circumstances don’t exist, however they are going to. We have already got clients who’re asking us to develop them—within the related automotive area, for instance.

“We haven’t made an enormous splash about Standalone core, however we’ve a Standalone core deployed and we do have business customers on it, and we’re slowly transferring extra business customers onto it,” he confirmed. “We’re marching down the street on Standalone core identical to everybody else is, and I believe everyone seems to be within the place the place it must be well-distributed—we’ve already executed that with Non-Standalone, due to the structure we used there … so our Standalone core will comply with in the identical places. Quite a lot of the identical infrastructure is getting used for Non-Standalone that we’re going to maneuver over to Standalone. And we’ll be prepared. I believe initially it’s going to be a variety of enterprise use circumstances … after which it’ll transfer into the buyer use circumstances. I believe that’s going to take a while. I received’t hold forth on how lengthy. However we may have a well-distributed Standlone core, which we’ve been within the means of doing with our [NSA] build-out, and we’ll be prepared when the cosumer use circumstances come on-line, no matter these are.”