AT&T 'Well Down the Path' of Transforming Its Network: Executive
As the FCC moves forward on revised copper retirement and other rule changes (see 2507240048), AT&T is quickly retiring parts of its network, said Jeremy Legg, chief technology officer for AT&T Services, at a KeyBanc financial conference Monday.
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AT&T’s goal is to modernize its network, and “it's well documented that we're well down the path of getting through the regulatory environment to be able to decommission as many … legacy services as we can,” Legg said. “We don’t have any choice.”
“It's really an exciting time to be in telecommunications,” he added. “Think about the kinds of investments that are going into the ground, going up in the air and satellite. It's really one of those moments where all the technology is transforming.”
AT&T is also already “well down the path” of putting open radio access network (ORAN) gear from Ericsson into its wireless network, Legg said. He highlighted an announcement last week that AT&T, working with partners, achieved “a major milestone” by completing the first ORAN call using third-party radios at AT&T Labs (see 2508050023).
The company has transferred millions of subscribers to its stand-alone 5G core network, “and we'll continue to ramp that up,” Legg said. He noted that AT&T is also laying fiber “roughly the equivalent” of the distance from New York to Los Angeles on a monthly basis, including last-mile and middle-mile connections.
The intent is to use software “to build new products and services into the network itself and use public cloud infrastructure to be able to do that,” Legg said. He discussed the importance of open application programmable interfaces (APIs) (see 2504160041). “The long pole in the tent will be the API layers that sit on top of this infrastructure and how much adoption you really begin to see across the industry in leveraging those APIs.”
Legg also talked about how much customer outreach will change during the next few years. In AT&T stores, salespeople will have all the information “consolidated from any calls you've made to customer care, any outages that you've experienced, where you are in your upgrade cycle for your iPhone, [and] basic customer relationship management kinds of capabilities at retail that we have heretofore not had enough of.”