AT&T says FirstNet provides about 28,000 agencies with about 5.9 million connections

About 28,000 public-safety agencies subscribing to the FirstNet utilized approximately 5.9 million connections on nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) through the end of March, FirstNet contractor AT&T reported today during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

AT&T CEO John Stankey highlighted FirstNet as he explained why he believes the carrier’s connectivity solutions appeal to the business sector and will continue to so well into the future.

“We continue to build out a connectivity portfolio with real long-term growth opportunity,” Stankey said during the teleconference with industry analysts. “Take FirstNet. This prioritized service for first responders shows what we’re able to accomplish when we focus on growing our business in areas where we have traditionally under-indexed.”

AT&T CFO Pascal Deroches echoed this sentiment.

“We believe our 5G and fiber expansion presents plenty of growth opportunities,” Deroches said. “We’re already seeing this in some of the parts of our broader Business Solutions results today. A great example is FirstNet, where wireless connections grew about 320,000 sequentially.”

With 320,000 additional net connections during the first quarter—a significant figure, given the fact that the net additional connections had been below 300,000 for the previous two quarters—FirstNet provided about a total of 5.9 million connections to public-safety subscribers when the first quarter was completed at the end of March, according to AT&T.

Meanwhile, the number of public-safety agencies using FirstNet increased from 27,500 to about 28,000 during the first quarter, AT&T reported. This marked the second consecutive quarter in which the net number of new agencies has totaled less than 1,000.

Of course, the most significant event for AT&T and FirstNet was the Feb. 22 outage that impacted NPSBN public-safety subscribers throughout the U.S.—although not all agencies experienced problems—during a period of less than three hours during the early-morning hours that day. AT&T commercial customers experienced an outage that lasted several additional hours longer than FirstNet users.

More than two months later, little is known about the cause of the outage, except that AT&T has emphasized publicly that the disruption was not the result of a cyberattack.

In a Feb. 25 letter to employees, Stankey wrote that “our initial review of the cause of Thursday’s outage indicates it was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network.” AT&T has not provided further information publicly about what this explanation means.

AT&T was required to provide the FirstNet Authority—the federal-government entity that oversees the FirstNet system—with an after-action report about the outage that was due in late March. Sources indicate that the after-action report was completed, but the FirstNet Authority has not released any information to date about the outage report or what measures it wants taken to ensure that a similar NPSBN outage does not happen again in the future.

Stankey talked about the Feb. 22 outage during today’s quarterly teleconference call. He expressed frustration with the event but did not provide any new insights regarding the cause of the outage or specifics about the measures AT&T has taken to prevent a similar issue in the future.

“I’m upset that we had it,” Stankey said during the teleconference call with analysts. “It’s unfortunate we had it. The entire team feels responsible for it. We know we can do better. We’ve put in place an awful lot of steps to ensure that we do better moving forward. I think I’m confident that we have done that. And I feel like we can operate better than what we exhibited on that particular morning.

“Now, having said that, I’m really proud of the way they [AT&T employees] responded to the circumstances when they occurred … They managed through the situation as well as could be expected.”