AT&T says FirstNet adoption surpasses 5 million connections, 26,000 agencies

FirstNet’s nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) provides more than 5 million connections to U.S. first-responder and supports more than 26,000 agencies, according to FirstNet Authority contractor and carrier AT&T.

AT&T unveiled the figures today during the carrier giant’s quarterly conference call with analysts that explored the company’s performance during the second quarter of this year. AT&T officials noted that the carrier gained 326,000 net postpaid phone additions during the second quarter, and AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches noted the key role that FirstNet is playing in the company’s growth in this area.

“Business solutions wireless revenues grew 9.1%,” Desroches said during conference call with analysts. “FirstNet continues to be a driver of this growth. [FirstNet] Connections grew by about 350,000 sequentially, with a little more than one-third of this growth from postpaid phones.

“What we’ve accomplished with FirstNet is truly remarkable. Not long ago, this was an underpenetrated segment of our customer base, but by committing to delivering a best-in-class network and tailored solutions for first responders, we’ve become the unquestioned industry leader by exclusively serving the public-safety community with 5 million FirstNet connections in just five years. We believe there is runway to continue this growth.”

Certainly the growth has been consistent, based on the totals that AT&T has released during its quarterly updates, with the NPSBN gaining at least 300,000 public-safety connections and 1,000 public-safety agencies in each of the last seven quarters, dating back to the fourth quarter of 2021.

An AT&T spokesperson provided clarification regarding the FirstNet figures released today, noting that the 26,000 subscribing public-safety agencies reflect only agencies that proactively subscribe to FirstNet. In other words, a public-safety officer subscribing to FirstNet as an individual does not mean that the officer’s agency automatically is counted as a subscribing agency, according to information provided by AT&T in response to an inquiry from IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

In addition, AT&T answered some questions—notably, from a recent blog written by a Verizon attorney—recently directed toward its FirstNet connections figures. AT&T has a “FirstNet and Family” plan, which allow a public-safety user to include family members on a single wireless bill. During the past week, AT&T has emphasized that only the public-safety user’s traffic is processed by the FirstNet core, which enables the always-on priority and preemption services that come with FirstNet.

These public-safety users are the only ones counted toward the FirstNet connection figures; the accompanying family members in these plans are simply treated as regular AT&T consumer customers, with their traffic utilizing the carrier’s commercial core that does not include priority and preemption services, according to information provided by AT&T.

While Desroches touted FirstNet’s leadership in the public-safety space, Verizon claims that it “serves a majority of our nation’s first responders.”

What is not in dispute is that FirstNet’s existence and development has dramatically changed the public-safety broadband marketplace, which was dominated by Verizon when AT&T won the 25-year contract with the FirstNet Authority in March 2017.

A year later, AT&T embarked on a five-year buildout plan to deploy the LTE-based NPSBN on the 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum licensed to the FirstNet Authority. In March, AT&T announced that it completed this initial buildout work on schedule, although FirstNet Authority officials are still in the process of validating whether AT&T completed all aspects included in the massive engineering project.

Surpassing the 5-million-connections mark is another significant milestone for the FirstNet system, which some observers initially believed would only be gaining public-safety subscribers after the Band 14 deployment was substantially done. Instead, AT&T chose to provide FirstNet customers with priority and preemption services across its commercial spectrum bands, which greatly accelerated FirstNet adoption even while the Band 14 deployment was in its early stages.