10 Gig Up & Down to 15 Million! at AT&T - Newsbreak

 ATT XGS 1010 230Ed Walter beamed with pride as he told us AT&T's next 15 million lines of fiber will offer 10 gigabits upstream and down. This is the first large 10 Gbps symmetric build in the world. 

"The additional cost for 10 Gbps up was modest. Customers love speed on fiber; 10 gig will give us a marketing edge." His presentation added

XGS PON for AT&T Fiber Broadband Services evolution is happening NOW • Greater capacity & symmetrical speeds • Gold standard for Low latency applications

CFO Pascal Desroches knows the fiber is paying off. "We continue to win share wherever we have fiber. We now have 5.7 million AT&T Fiber customers, with 3.4 million of them on one-gig connections." The fiber brings AT&T another advantage, as Jeff McElfresh explains. "Seven out of 10 additions to our fiber network in this last quarter were new accounts to AT&T and, therefore, give us an opportunity to go drive Mobility growth as well in the footprints where we built it."

CEO John Stankey adds he's doing, "About three million passings a year, and we'll ultimately probably ramp that into five." 

AT&T added 289,000 fiber customers in the latest quarter. 37% of the ~15 million homes now covered have subscribed. DSL customers continue to flee to cable but overall art is adding broadband lines and income. Broadband revenues were up 8% Q3.

New chairman Bill Kennard believes in investing. He's raised capex to a projected $21 billion in 2021 and $24 billion in 2022. AT&T and Verizon have been under-investing for years. Although earnings have been flat, AT&T raised dividends every year.

The stock price stayed high and so did CEO bonuses. The result has been losses to cable in-home connections. T-Mobile is killing them in cellular. 

With the $40 billion debacle in DirecTV & Time Warner, AT&T finally had to cut the dividend and take a big write-off. The stock has fallen to the lowest level in more than a decade.

AT&T stock is now so low that if I picked stocks, I'd probably rate it a buy on valuation.

 

From AT&T 

AT&T ‘State of PON’ Summary 68 • AT&T’s 5G, FTTP, and FTTB access connectivity solutions all require critical investments in Fiber • Nationwide 5G in Summer 2020 • XGS PON for AT&T Fiber Broadband Services evolution is happening NOW • Greater capacity & symmetrical speeds • Gold standard for Low latency applications • Longer infrastructure investment life & lower $/Gb

 From a vendor who hopes to supply the 10G boxes

Radisys Introduces White Box Combo PON Optical Line Terminals for Next-Gen FTTX Networks

 

Broadband service providers can leverage the open and disaggregated OLT platform to support both G-PON and XGS-PON services on the same fiber

HILLSBORO, OR, U.S. – July 13, 2021 – Radisys® Corporation, a global leader of open telecom solutions, today introduced the Radisys Combo PON Optical Line Terminal (OLT) as part of the Radisys Connect Open Broadband portfolio for broadband service providers. The complete family of Radisys OLTs includes 16 and 32-port versions—a variant of which is the Radisys white box Combo PON OLT that supports both G-PON (2.488 Gbps downstream / 1.244 Gbps upstream) and XGS-PON (10 Gbps symmetrical) within the same PON port of the OLT. The white box OLTs are based on the VOLTHA/SEBA reference architecture and are field hardened and scaled for commercial deployments today.

News Highlights

  • A growing number of global service providers are moving forward with XGS-PON as their next-generation PON technology of choice. Analyst firm Dell-Oro group predicts XGS-PON will be the favored PON technology for the future.
  • Radisys’ Combo PON OLT allows broadband providers to take advantage of pervasive G-PON technology while giving them a flexible upgrade path to scale up and rollout XGS-PON deployments without costly rip and replace.
  • Radisys' Combo PON OLT is an open, flexible, highly scalable telco-grade white box designed to address key service providers’ needs.
    • Full PON port flexibility enables G-PON, XGS-PON or Combo PON (G-PON and XGS-PON) on any port on the same platform.
    • Open architecture delivers datacenter-driven cost efficiencies and high port densities which make it suitable for residential, cloud and enterprise services to simplify deployments and reduce operating expenses.
    • Compatibility with any ONF VOLTHA-based software, including Radisys’ Connect Broadband Access Controller (CBAC) software, allows service providers to scale hardware up or down while the management software and all other Connect Open Broadband components remain intact.
    • Flexibility to deploy virtualized functions either in a distributed fashion running within the OLT CPU, or as a centralized function hosted on an external server or a public or private cloud.
  • The Radisys’ Combo PON OLTs are part of the Connect Open Broadband product suite, which includes open and disaggregated software, hardware and management.
  • The complete family of Radisys OLTs also includes the 16 and 32 port OLTs. The Radisys 32 port G-PON OLT (RLT-3200G) was recently certified for VOLTHA v2.8 through Open Networking Foundation’s Continuous Certification Program.

“Radisys Combo PON OLTs give broadband providers an optimal economic advantage with the flexibility to use both G-PON and XGS-PON in their networks and through a reduction in space and power consumption,” said Harris Razak, senior vice president of Broadband Access, Radisys. “All products in the Connect Open Broadband portfolio utilize the same management system and controlling software, allowing our provider customers to choose the features and capacity they want while keeping other network elements the same, lowering their total cost of ownership and optimizing their Capex and Opex.”

“We are pleased that Radisys’ 32 port G-PON OLT has been named a certified VOLTHA product within the ONF. This certification, along with the introduction of the Radisys Combo PON OLT with upcoming support for VOLTHA/SEBA, continues to expand solution choices for broadband services providers and their FTTX deployments,” said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ONF. “As an ONF Partner Member, Radisys has been instrumental in the development of ONF open reference designs as well as the commercialization of ONF-based solutions. The Continuous Certification Program ensures that service providers can easily identify certified products for specific ONF platforms from a vibrant ecosystem of vendors delivering and deploying ONF open source solutions.”