AT&T FTTH Gains Seem Mostly Upgrades by Existing Customers

What impact is AT&T fiber-to-home having on company internet access accounts. Well, it is, as they say, “complicated.” For two decades or more, when a telco replaces copper access lines with optical fiber, it sees two types of changes.

Copper-based accounts go down, while optical accounts go up. Perhaps most of the change is simply existing customers switching from copper to fiber access services, for little net gain in total accounts.

That seems to be happening with AT&T FTTH accounts as well. According to Moffett Nathanson, AT&T achieved 57 percent growth rates for its FTTH services over the past year. But total broadband accounts have not grown at the same rate.

“Despite the dramatic growth at AT&T Fiber, AT&T’s broader IP broadband category has posted only modest subscriber gains over the past year,” the firm says.

The logical explanation is that existing customers have been upgrading to the new FTTH service, and dropping their former copper or fiber-to-node service. That also would make sense if AT&T conducted the sort of marketing campaigns cable operators do when introducing a new service: target existing customers first.

Over time, as those conversions reach an end, AT&T is likely to switch to targeting non-subscribers. Only after a few years of that activity will we be able to assess how well AT&T’s FTTH program has been in potentially taking market share from cable operators.