AT&T expresses optimism about FirstNet prospect, might accelerate deployment with tax reform
Stephenson indicated that accelerated deployments could include a quicker buildout of the company’s plans to extend fiber to 12.5 million homes. Similarly, wireless deployment plans could be accelerated under a new tax regime—a scenario that could impact FirstNet, if AT&T is awarded the contract to build and maintain the much-anticipated nationwide public-safety broadband network.
“We are in the process of deploying 40 MHz of spectrum,” Stephenson said. “Are there some things that we would do to bring forward some of the wireless build and bring our mobile speeds up considerably?
“And let’s assume—and, by the way, this is unknown—but, if we were to win the FirstNet bid, would we want to go faster on the deployment of FirstNet with tax reform? There’s just a long list of things that, where the business case is really good, you could accelerate your build requirements and accelerate the business cases on many of these.”
Stephenson said that tax reform and regulatory reforms could have a positive impact on the general economy. For AT&T, such economic growth would have a notable impact on the carrier’s important enterprise customer base.
“The lion’s share of our wireless business is the business side, and we’re continuing to grow there very nicely—our wireless business-to-business customers,” Stephenson said. “Where we’re having our greatest success with our customers is getting them from the mobile device on a secure network—a VPN connection—and getting them into the cloud … and back out, without ever touching the public Internet.
“This is proving to be a very powerful capability for our business customers, and we are having incredible success bringing [Internet of Things] solutions to bear along with this.”