Connectivity Expo 2023
AT&T’s capital spend last year was about $24 billion, including fiber and wireless, and it will be roughly the same this year. But the carrier continues to drive down costs for its infrastructure buildout, Christopher Sambar, Executive VP, AT&T Network, said at the Connectivity Expo 2023 Powered by WIA, held earlier this month in New Orleans.
“That’s a lot of money on the network side. My team is responsible for about $15 billion for network operations,” Sambar said. “However, my boss always wants me to deploy more infrastructure with less money.”
Sambar emphasized AT&T’s commitment to Open RAN. Driving the carrier’s interest in O-RAN is the possibility that it may help reduce costs, he added. But he said the carrier still has “a ways to go” in the initiative.
“We’ve got to prove-in the cost model and make sure that it makes sense,” he said. “We think there’s a lot of upside, hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs that we can probably remove from the ecosystem and save a lot if we can get this initiative right. We expect to be on the network in the coming years.”
The carrier is using open, disaggregated platforms to reduce its costs and speeding deployment of 5G and fiber broadband, including next-gen edge routers, cell site gateway routers, Ethernet MUX, universal customer premise equipment and Open ROADM.
Sambar said AT&T’s core backbone looks more like a data center than a telco office, because older monolithic routers that route the backbone traffic have been broken up and disaggregated with COTS hardware. So far, the carrier has migrated more than half of its production traffic to next-gen core routers.
“We load functions on [the core backbone] and operate it as if we are operating a data center,” he said. “And best of all, one of these next-gen core routers is six times less expensive, while providing the same amount of bandwidth as the older, proprietary router.”
Sambar also highlighted AT&T’s deployment of Open ROADM high speed, high-capacity optical transport to support its fiber-based broadband and 5G backhaul. It has installed more than 75 nodes and turned up 100G and 400G wavelengths in its production network. It uses similar methods to O-RAN to reduce costs.
“We started the Open ROADM initiative years ago and by the end of 2025, we estimate that we will have saved over $2 billion. With the Open ROADM initiative, similar to O-RAN, rather than having to use just one single vendor partner, we’re able to break that up and mix and match equipment from different vendors,” Sambar said.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Tower Technology Editor
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