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AT&T will slash $3 billion off its capital investments next year
AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion this year. [...] The company is on pace to exceed its 2019 goal as it averaged more than $6 billion per quarter in the first three quarters. But with a forecast of $20 billion across all of 2020, AT&T expects to spend about $5 billion per quarter on capital investments going forward. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner.
[...] AT&T's capital spending will decline next year despite the company's plan to roll 5G mobile service out nationwide. AT&T already got much of the 5G spending out of the way by purchasing spectrum licenses, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors that the company's "strong spectrum position will allow for lower capital intensity" over the next three years.
AT&T has also mostly stopped its fiber-to-the-home broadband construction even though large portions of its 21-state territory still have only copper-based DSL service. Fiber deployment isn't stopping completely, as Stephenson said that "5G requires us to continue deploying fiber." But AT&T customers who can't get modern broadband speeds or reliable wireline service in their homes would welcome more capital investment in their neighborhoods.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by hwertz on Thursday October 31 2019, @06:18AM
AT&T's done this before... they'll cut spending, then, several years later it's like "How did our network get so bad?" When the iphone came out as an AT&T exclusive AT&T's network rather comprehensively crashed and burned. The news narrative was that "no carrier" could have handled this surge... but... a) The overseas carriers that got iphone exclusive handled it fine. b) Verizon Wireless at the time said they had a larger quarterly increase in data use than AT&T, from android phones and air cards mainly. In actuality, AT&T was just at the tail end of a previous cycle of reduced network investment.
That said, playing devil's advocate, I suppose it's possible all that modernization (the years-long conversion that AT&T, T-Mo, VZW, and I suppose Sprint have done from telecom-style internals to more IP and VOIP-style) has paid off and the equipment is far less expensive, spend less for the same amount of upgrades.