Fibertower Corp fka FBBT

[rfarmer]

AT&T CEO w/ Godman Sachs:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4106088-ts-t-ceo-randall-stephenson-presents-goldman-sachs-communacopia-conference-transcript?part=single

Brett Feldman

And so you sort of thinking about this, you are basically saying there is a new way you can monetize your network. It's not just network traffic, but there is intelligence in the network. And you can monetize that intelligence. So let's spend a little bit of time talking about the network itself. You are making some pretty big investments there.

You are shrinking fiber to something like 13 million customer location. You're doing the first net build out which you talked about earlier. You've got a network virtualization initiative under way. Ultimately where are you trying to get your network? What is that you need to be able to do for you in terms of product delivery, and also in terms of cost efficiency?

Randall Stephenson

I think of the bogie -- or anybody who is delivering network services to the consumer or the business, the bogie has to be 1 gig speeds. And I mean 1 gig speeds whether it's fiber to the home or 1 gig speeds on a smartphone that has to be the bogie. And so, we're on a trajectory with our network evolution, LTE evolution that continues to move us towards that destination.

And we're using multiple technological architectures to get there, but obviously LTE there are LTE derivatives, LTEA and LTE-LA and so forth. With MIMO and so forth that take us down a path like in Austin where we have deployed this technology and we are getting 750 meg type speeds on our existing network in Austin. You are going to see us deploy that broadly over the next year or two. You're also seeing us invest aggressively as you said in deploying fiber, fiber-to-the home, fiber-to-businesses, and fiber to all the sale sites. And as we move into a world of 5G, fifth-generation networks, it's going to be operating at millimeter wave spectrum that we secured a nice footprint of this millimeter high frequency spectrum with high bandwidth, the ability to get incredible speeds, we have secured that. You'll see us begin building that out in end of 2018 timeframe. And so, this is how over the next few years you get 1 gig speeds ubiquitously. That is our target. We need 1 gig speeds. There will be used cases that drive the first deployments of this. Used cases for 5G, the most logical one that comes to mind are those that have really low latency requirements. It's one thing to have fast networks, that's great, you need this gig speed. But the other thing you need is really low latency like sub 10 millisecond latency. What applications and uses have those kinds of low latency requirements? Think autonomous cars, think drones, these are the kind of applications that have really low latency requirements.

And so, our network evolution is not just getting faster speeds than our mobile networks. That's critical. It's not just getting lower latency. That's critical. We got to get the latency out of the entire network. So, think about autonomous cars, where you'd have live maps and maps that are being updated in the cloud, you cannot have a centralized cloud infrastructure hundreds of miles away and have autonomous cars. That cloud has to be distributed. I love our position of being able to have the distributed cloud. Our software-defined networking makes us possible. But literally you have distributed cloud, distributed compute architecture, where you have it at every sale site, think 70,000 sale sites at every node, at every central office, multiple distribution points, where you can get the content as close to the autonomous car or whatever application you're thinking as humanly possible. That's what's required to get to this sub 10 millisecond speeds, so that you have what is from a human standpoint and a reality standpoint, instantaneous communication. We do not want an autonomous car that has 25 to 30 millisecond type latency. That's an accident. Those are safety issues. And so, all of this is critical to get these used cases that we all think about virtual reality and augmented reality will require these kinds of low latency requirements. And so, we're building this infrastructure now that we have the capital lined up behind it, we will be going aggressively, the standards, we've been working the standards aggressively. We think it's really important that we have global standards around this technology, and we're very, very close to having that done. And so, I look forward to bringing some of these services online 2018.