AT&T says FirstNet has about 4.7 million connections, 25,000 agencies

FirstNet supports more than 4.7 million connections for public-safety subscribers representing more than 25,000 agencies as of the end of March, AT&T stated today in conjunction with the release of the carrier’s first-quarter earnings.

AT&T CEO John Stankey indicated that the public-safety adoption of FirstNet is ahead of the contractual obligation for the metric as AT&T and the FirstNet Authority recently completed the sixth year in the 25-year public-private arrangement.

“We are in really good shape [in terms of meeting public-safety adoption thresholds],” Stankey said during AT&T first-quarter earnings call. “We’re kind of through what I would call the first set of milestones that frame the first seven years of the contract. We’ve ticked through all of those responsibilities and obligations, as expected. There’s nothing there that’s a problem or anything lurking. In fact—broadly speaking—I think we’ve performed incredibly well.

“I don’t want to speak on behalf of the FirstNet Authority, but I think both parties feel like it’s been a very productive public-private partnership. We continue to plan for what we can do in the future to extend it [FirstNet] in other ways and do big things with it.”

Another portion of the 25-year deal with the FirstNet Authority required AT&T to complete the deployment of a nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) on 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum within a five-year period that concluded at the end of March. AT&T announced that it completed this initial buildout on time, but the FirstNet Authority is in the process of validating that all contracted tasks were finished successfully.

If AT&T’s work on the NPSBN passes the FirstNet Authority’s scrutiny, the carrier giant would be eligible to receive its last payment that is part of a potential $6.5 billion total—federal funding generated by FCC spectrum auctions conducted almost a decade ago—that is part of the long-term agreement with the FirstNet Authority.

Meanwhile, AT&T will continue to make annual payments to the FirstNet Authority for the duration of the 25-year deal. These steadily increasing payments will total $18 billion during the life of the contract, of which about $3 billion is expected to fund the operations of the FirstNet Authority organization. The remaining $15 billion is required to be invested back into the FirstNet system.

AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said that FirstNet gained about 300,000 public-safety connections—about 40% of which were postpaid phone subscriptions—during the first quarter. These FirstNet gains represent a substantial percentage of AT&T’s overall net gain of 424,000 mobile postpaid subscribers during the first three months of the year.

These additions resulted in the number of total FirstNet connections jumping from 4.4 million connections at the end of 2022 to about 4.7 million connections at the end of the first quarter, according to AT&T.

The 25,000-plus agencies supported by FirstNet represents a 1,000-agency subscription increase when compared to figures released at the end of 2022.