AT&T Mulls Upgrading Rural Lines Without New Fiber

AT&T has about 15 million lines in rural areas that company management might have preferred to sell, but the company apparently cannot find buyers. So AT&T now is considering a plan to upgrade those lines, Bloomberg reports. 


In a possibly-significant move, AT&T apparently is looking at ways to upgrade the all-copper lines without installing new optical fiber in the transport portions of the access network, using IP Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexers. 


Two decades ago, before mobility became the growth engine for the global telecom industry, it might have seemed inevitable that fiber "to where you can make money" was the future. These days, the problem is that the "fiber to where you can make money" equation has changed for the worse. 


If AT&T can figure out how to upgrade all-copper lines using only new DSLAMs, that would be a major innovation, as the business case for U-verse or fiber to the home in its rural areas is beyond challenging.