John Stankey, CEO of American telecommunications operator AT&T, stated that the recently reached Open RAN partnership agreement between the operator and Ericsson will make AT&T more efficient, but he said, “I don’t think this will bring any changes from a capital intensive perspective.”
John Stankey stated at this Tuesday’s investor event that the $14 billion new agreement reached between AT&T and Ericsson “enables us to operate our business more effectively. This is simpler for us. Its core is a network infrastructure, and there is a system to support it, which is all you want to do to make us a more efficient enterprise.”
“I think what we will see is an improvement in efficiency at the unit level,” he said of the new cooperation agreement. “The current situation is that the unit equipment you are deploying cannot bring you enough revenue and coverage, so we often have to deploy more unit equipment. Therefore, we are engaged in an endless battle to improve efficiency and keep up with traffic demand. I think this battle will continue.”
He explained that AT&T’s adoption of Open RAN technology will not have a significant impact on its overall network spending. “I don’t think I can tell you that O-RAN is the secret to reducing the capital intensity percentage of this capital intensive business to single digits,” he said. “I don’t think the situation will be like this. This will be a tool that we will use to continue managing this issue and maintain capital intensity at around 15%.”
“We must consider this comprehensively,” John Stankey added. “This is part of our (network) investment, not all of our comprehensive investment. It’s not all of our RAN investment, it’s just a part of it.”