From the whirlwind of 2023, marked by expansive fiber builds, cable upgrades and historic investments in broadband, Fierce Telecom editors have sifted through our coverage to highlight some of this year's standout stories.
Join us as we recap a few of the pivotal moments that shaped the telecommunications landscape, unveiling our top picks from the year gone by.
1. Lumen’s new CEO prepares to ‘reset’ with new hires, culture shift
Lumen kicked off 2023 with the appointment of a new CEO, Kate Johnson, and the former Microsoft exec quickly outlined an ambitious plan to turn the company’s fortunes around. Her game plan: do fewer things and do them well, with a focus on solving the problems customers actually need vendors like Lumen to address.
On the residential front, Lumen came into the year planning to reevaluate its Quantum Fiber strategy, shifting its focus from quantity of passings to quality. By November, Lumen announced it would reduce its Quantum Fiber build pace in 2024 from 800,000 to 500,000 new locations, prompting analysts to suggest the company might be “better off selling the asset.”
Still, a spokesperson told Fierce Telecom this month that Lumen plans “to continue this healthy deployment pace while prioritizing sales and marketing investments to drive Quantum Fiber subscriber growth.”
2. Lumen announces 1,200 layoffs as ‘revenue headwinds’ continue
Despite early-year plans to turn Lumen around, in October the company announced layoffs to 4% of its workforce.
Johnson said during third-quarter earnings: “We’ve made the difficult decision to reshape and resize Lumen for growth.” The reorg “along with additional optimization initiatives” is expected to generate annualized savings of around $300 million.
As of September, Lumen had approximately 30,000 employees, which would mean 1,200 employees were impacted by those layoffs. As a result of the plan, Lumen said it would pay severance and related costs in the range of $55 to $65 million.
3. Here’s how cable giant Comcast is thinking about fiber
By February of this year Comcast was already the midst of a massive overhaul of its network, rolling out mid-split upgrades and plotting the launch of DOCSIS 4.0 in the second half of this year. At the time, Comcast Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi told Fierce there is also a place for fiber in the company’s future.
Nafshi outlined the operator’s plans to upgrade its network with distributed access architecture (DAA), transitioning from analogue to digital fiber and to a new virtualized architecture via a virtual Cable Modem Termination System (vCMTS). This year Comcast completed its first virtual broadband network gateway (vBNG) trial, in which it connected a fiber customer to its new vBNG/rOLT (remote optical line terminal) platform powered by the same vCMTS platform delivering gig service to its coaxial customers.
4. Here’s who’s overseeing broadband efforts in each state – ongoing
This year the U.S. federal government allocated a historic $42.5 billion for broadband expansion through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. The funding is allocated to the states, which are responsible for awarding it via their own competitive grant processes. Fierce Telecom compiled each state’s "Funding Amount" on an interactive map.
With states poised to play such a critical role this year and beyond, Fierce also took a closer look at who exactly will be overseeing broadband efforts in each state, which can been seen below the funding map.
5. AT&T’s Gigapower tackles fiber builds in AL, FL, PA
In May, AT&T and private equity firm BlackRock officially closed a deal to form a new fiber-focused joint venture called Gigapower, outlining plans to build in three previously undisclosed states. The operator had already announced Mesa, Arizona as one of its Gigapower markets.
At the time, AT&T confirmed Gigapower is targeting Chandler and Gilbert, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; parts of Alabama; Florida and Pennsylvania. The operator already serves more than 475,000 locations in Alabama with fiber under its AT&T brand.
Gigapower plans to deploy a multi-gig fiber network to an initial 1.5 million customer locations across the U.S. using a commercial wholesale open access platform. This month an AT&T spokesperson told Fierce: “The Gigapower fiber deployment will be incremental to AT&T’s plans to pass 30 million-plus fiber locations, including businesses, by the end of 2025.”
6. WSJ exposes major environmental issue for AT&T and Verizon
The Wall Street Journal published an investigative journalism exposé in July, reporting that AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies have left a massive network across the U.S. of old cables covered in toxic lead.
That story resulted in several follow up pieces from Fierce Telecom, including the fall of several prominent telco stocks as a result of the report. Shortly after the news broke, companies like AT&T and TDS disclosed internal reports on contamination in their respective networks.
As remediation efforts are expected to take several years, conversation around the topic is likely to continue.
7. Cisco responds as fresh layoff reports mount
Dozens of former and current Cisco employees flooded social media in July with claims of internal layoffs announced.
Cisco confirmed with Fierce Telecom there was a round of layoffs, and stated they were part of the 4,100 job cuts it had previously announced in November 2022. Cisco provided a statement which said the rebalancing effort it began in 2022 is “not about cost savings as we have roughly the same number of employees as we did before the process began.”
“This rebalancing is about prioritizing investments in our transformation, to meet and exceed our customers' expectations in the changing technology landscape,” the company added. In September of this year, Cisco announced its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk.
8. Cable giant Charter is building hundreds of thousands of fiber passings this year
Charter Communications talked a lot this year about its rural expansion plans. The subject came up in March as CFO Jessica Fischer touted the initiative during an investor conference. Most of its planned rural passings will be delivered with fiber.
Charter continued to add broadband subscribers in Q2 and Q3 (despite a price hike) through its existing and subsidized rural footprint, with new rural markets a bright spot for the operator.
CEO Chris Winfrey said during third-quarter earnings Charter expects to have added approximately 300,000 new subsidized rural passings in 2023, the same number Fischer mentioned earlier in the year. Charter will hope to accelerate that pace in 2024.
9. Here’s where Comcast is expanding its network in 2023
As of March Comcast was aiming to ramp rollouts from the 840,000 new passings it achieved in 2022 to as many as 1 million this year.
State targets included Texas, Washington, Oregon, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado, Kansas, Indiana and Minnesota.
Comcast through this year has continued to shed broadband subscribers, despite domestic broadband revenue being a bright spot. Domestic broadband net losses in Q3 were 18,000, a slight sequential improvement from 19,000 losses in the second quarter. CEO Brian Roberts has assured investors Comcast remains a competitive force in the market.
In June, Comcast also launched a new symmetrical 10-gig service tier for its Gigabit Pro fiber customers. And quite notably, Comcast was the first operator to begin rolling out DOCSIS 4.0 in November.
10. Google Fiber scores another deal in Colorado
In August Google Fiber announced another new Colorado market in Wheat Ridge.
Wheat Ridge is Google’s third fiber-to-the-home city in the Rocky Mountain state, joining Lakewood and Westminster.
This year Google Fiber added markets in several states, including Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Utah and Colorado. It also debuted a symmetrical 8 Gbps broadband tier in Arizona, and executives plotted the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business customers by the end of this year.