AT&T Blog, January, 26, 2023 — 2022 was pivotal for 5G rollouts and Fiber broadband expansion. And it stems from a vision and a plan to transform the network we began executing almost a decade ago to support our customers’ surging demand for connectivity.
5G – Three years after we launched 5G, it has become the fastest growing cellular generation. To put into perspective, it took 5G only 7 quarters to reach 250 million connections while 4G took 19 quarters to do the same.1 AT&T 5G now covers more than 288 million people, and our mid-band 5G+ is covering 150 million people. AT&T 5G+ over mmWave is available in parts of more than 50 cities and nearly 70 venues.
Fiber – As of Q4 2022, AT&T Fiber has the ability to serve more than 19 million consumer locations and more than 3 million business customer locations in more than 100 U.S. metro areas, and we are on track to pass 30 million-plus consumer and business locations by the end of 2025. Early in 2022, we launched and expanded our multi-gig services to offer up to 5 Gbps symmetric speeds to consumers and businesses.
This rapid deployment is not an accident. It is all done by design.
In 2013, we published our first blueprint for the network of the future. While the smartphone revolution was still in its early stages, our engineers and developers could see that the world was about to change. Data demands would increase faster than the network could grow if we stuck with the traditional, hardware-centric approach. As 4G took off and fiber and 5G were next up, our vision was of a software-centric model that put customers first. From large enterprises to the individual consumer, they need to be confident in the network they were riding on as those connections became increasingly central to every aspect of their lives and businesses.
AT&T Labs has been central in making that vision a reality. Just like your calculator, camera and other gadgets became apps on your phone, and light bulbs, thermostats, and other devices around your house became controllable over your home network, we’re turning network hardware into software and making it accessible remotely so we can upgrade and reconfigure it securely at internet speed.