AT&T CEO John Stankey (pictured) told investors he expects the US operator to reach more than 50 million fibre locations by the end of 2029, part of his belief it would be nearly ubiquitous by the end of the decade.

Stankey and other AT&T executives provided insight into the operator’s fibre plans during an investor event yesterday (3 December).

About 45 million of those fibre passings will come from “organic deployments”, with more than 5 million through its Gigapower joint venture with private equity company BlackRock Alternatives along with agreements with commercial open-access providers.

He said AT&T is on track to pass 29 million fibre locations by year-end. It began deployments in the mid-1980s.

Stankey noted the drive for more fibre is based on several factors, including a 70 per cent rise in mobile bandwidth since 2020.

“If we look at data consumption over the next five years, we expect that’s going to increase about 80 per cent.”

Technologies including AI, 4K streaming, user generated content and AR/VR are also driving the need for more bandwidth and fibre.

“The economics and the business model of getting fibre all the way to the end user started to make sense, and we began the final stages of this race,” he explained. “Our belief is that by about 2030, we’ll be done with that. It’ll have been about 45 years from the start to the finish.”

He noted while 45 years may seem like a long time, it’s about half the time it took copper to move to the same level of distribution and pick up a similar number of customers.

Fibre is also a key element for retiring all the operator’s copper assets.

“RF technology is great. We’ve done remarkable things with it. Satellites are going to play a role. But at the end of the day, fibre has better performance upstream, downstream, latency, resiliency, scalability and marginal cost, and it will win.”

He said over the next decade, networks will not be fixed or mobile but rather fibre with “different access technologies hanging on the outside of it”.

“That’s the fundamental direction of converging our networks and our approach to the markets that we believe is taking shape as we move through the balance of this decade.”

The operator plans to expand its 5G network to cover more than 300 million PoPs by the end of 2025, while most of the rest of the nation will be covered by satellite.

It plans to return more than $40 million to shareholders over the next three years through share repurchases and stock dividends.

Yearly capital investment is set to remain in the range of $22 billion over the same timeframe.

It plans to keep about $10 billion on hand for incremental financial flexibility for potential strategic growth investments, debt repayment or additional dividends or share repurchases.