According to foreign media Light Reading, American AT&T senior executive vice president and chief financial officer Pascal Desroches said that although the company may be a leader in the supply chain, the recent interruption in optical fiber supply has caused the company to reduce its FTTP construction plan in 2021.
Earlier, AT&T stated that it will add 3 million FTTP household coverage (Homes Passed) this year. But at the meeting on Tuesday, the operator stated that the target would drop to around 2.5 million.
Desroches said: “Until the second quarter, we have not really felt any impact of the supply chain disruption that occurred throughout the industry. But since the third quarter, we have seen everything become chaotic, including fiber supply.”
Susan Johnson, executive vice president of AT&T’s global connectivity and supply chain, warned in May that the company was cautious about the impact of global chipset shortages on its 5G and fiber optic connectivity businesses.
Desroches said that he does not expect the current problems to exist for a long time, and pointed out that AT&T has a “priority position in the supply chain”. AT&T has yet to say whether recent supply chain trends will affect its plans to expand fiber optics to another 4 million locations in 2022.
Desroches said: “I think this is very important, because if we feel pain in this matter, I can only imagine what other people in this industry are going through.”
From service providers to technology suppliers, many other companies are feeling the pressure.
Plan to accelerate the pace of increasing fiber optic users
As fiber-optic broadband is becoming the operator’s main growth driver, AT&T had to lower its FTTP expansion plan in 2021, which may have a certain impact on the company’s goal of accelerating the increase of fiber-optic users in the second half of 2021.
AT&T added 246,000 fiber-optic broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2021, bringing the total to 5.43 million. The operator said last month that about 1 million fiber optic users will be added throughout 2021.
AT&T estimates that nearly 80% of new fiber optic users are also new users of the company, reversing the previous trend that a significant portion of its new FTTP customers come from existing AT&T high-speed Internet customers upgrading on the old VDSL and DSL platforms.
In AT&T’s second-quarter conference call last month, Desroches declared that with the continued growth of broadband revenue and the decline in traditional revenue, the company’s consumer wireline business has reached a “major turning point”. At the same time, AT&T’s broadband average revenue per user (ARPU) reached 54.76 US dollars in the second quarter of 2021, higher than 51.61 US dollars in the same period last year.
