Earlier this month AT&T responded to the President's clear support of Title II by bluffing and claiming they were freezing all fiber investment to "up to" 100 cities. If you've been around here for a while you know that AT&T's plans to deploy fiber to 100 cities was always a heavy dose of smoke and mirrors to begin with, the company in reality repeatedly slashing their fixed-line investment projections (they had just cut fixed-line spending CAPEX by $3 billion just three days before the President's announcement).
Apparently, AT&T forgot that they were currently facing a merger review, involving people who are actually looking at hard data and not just hyperbole. Jamillia Ferris, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who is aiding the FCC in reviewing their DirecTV acquisition plans, quickly sent AT&T a letter asking the company to clearly detail its fiber investment plans with specific facts. In their heavily-redacted response letter to the FCC this week, AT&T basically walks back their bluff, insisting that the FCC misunderstood what they said.
quote:
The premise of the Commission’s November 14 Letter is incorrect. AT&T is notlimiting our FTTP deployment to 2 million homes. To the contrary, AT&T still plans tocomplete the major initiative we announced in April to expand our ultra-fast GigaPower fiber network in 25 major metropolitan areas nationwide, including 21 new major metropolitan areas.
What AT&T's actually been doing in those markets is bumping speeds to a select number of high-end affluent housing developments, then
pretending said deployments are much more significant than they actually are as to save face in the age of Google Fiber. In fact if anything AT&T's actually reducing it's traditional broadband footprint as it looks to
back away from DSL customers they refuse to upgrade via something it has convinced regulators should be gloriously defined as the "IP transition."
Though Stephenson pretty clearly stated AT&T would pause their 100 city deployment (which was again, never 100 cities) because of the President's Title II support, AT&T's letter now states Stephenson was only talking about deployments beyond their original expansion goals:
quote:
While we have reiterated that we will stand by the commitments described above, this uncertainty makes it prudent to pause consideration of any further investments – beyond those discussed above – to bring advanced broadband networks to even more customer locations, including additional upgrades of existing DSL and IPDSL lines, that might be feasible in the future under a more stable and predictable regulatory regime. To be clear, AT&T has not stated that the President’s proposal would render all of these locations unprofitable. Rather, AT&T simply cannot evaluate additional investment beyond its existing commitments until the regulatory treatment of broadband service is clarified.
AT&T has tinkered with and modified their broadband expansion promises so many times over the years to get regulatory favors (it was a favored tactic to get the BellSouth deal approved, was attempted during T-Mobile, and is a centerpiece of the DirecTV deal), you'd be hard pressed to know where the truth ends and the distortion begins. The company's letter doesn't help out much in this regard, given most of the pertinent information is redacted. Still, it's at least entertaining that by simply doing its job and asking questions the FCC managed to get them to walk back the bluff -- for now.
AT&T reponse to FCC
