AT&T's Stephenson: FTTP adoption rate is strong

AT&T (NYSE: T) is seeing some early success with its fiber deployments. AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson told investors at a J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference today that the company is seeing good uptake of its fiber to the building deployments from the small and medium-size business market.  "We are deploying fiber and making provisioning commitments in the 60 to 90 day time horizon," Stephenson said. "We are taking considerable share."

Randall Stephenson, AT&T

Stephenson (Image source: AT&T)

On the fiber-to-the-premises side, Stephenson said that while the company's Austin, Texas, deployment of 1 Gbps is focused primarily on some Greenfield housing developments, the business case is very good and he believes demand is high for the service.

Interestingly, the telco has been mainly offering lower speed services over the FTTP network. In April, a report emerged that the telco upped the speed on its FTTP network 24/3 Mbps, up from 18/1.5 Mbps.

The AT&T chief also noted that as the company is no longer investing in DS1 and instead pushing its Ethernet transport, which is 50 percent more efficient than DS1.  He said that this efficiency, coupled with the growth in virtualization and the cloud will likely drive down capital expenditures for the company. "New technologies are more efficient and will drive a downward bias to capital spend," he said.

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