AT&T is preparing to upgrade customers in three Louisiana towns to GPON fiber, after a recent hurricane wreaked havoc on its copper assets.
In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), AT&T said Hurricane Ida “significantly damaged” its copper cables and terminals in Baton Rouge, Denham Springs and Zachary, Louisiana when it made landfall in late August. Immediately following the storm, the FCC reported 338,115 customers in Louisiana had lost internet, TV or telephone service, as had 16,106 customers in Mississippi and 478 in Alabama, though these figures were not limited to AT&T customers.
While AT&T’s copper infrastructure in the area has been temporarily repaired to restore service to customers, the operator said it “plans to utilize existing Gigabit Passive Optical Network/Fiber-to-the-Premises (GPON/FTTP) systems to migrate all affected customers previously served on copper cables in the affected distribution areas.”
More than 2,000 addresses will be impacted by the upgrade, a list AT&T submitted with the filing showed.
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AT&T noted in several other recent filings it also plans to migrate customers from copper to GPON FTTP in Oakville, Missouri; Clarksville, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Florida, though the scale of this work is limited to a handful of properties.
The moves come as AT&T works toward a goal of deploying fiber to at least 2.5 million new locations by the end of 2021 as part of a longer-term plan to double its total fiber footprint to 30 million locations by end-2025.
CEO John Stankey recently hinted AT&T could look to deploy fiber to even more locations if Congress passes an infrastructure bill which allots billions in funding for broadband.