AT&T today announced its Q1 2022 earnings results through which it provided updates on its consumer-facing fiber broadband unit and business wireline fiber initiatives. Particularly, AT&T disclosed incremental details on its historical fiber broadband revenue and fiber average revenue per user (ARPU) metrics.
AT&T Consumer Wireline – Q1 2022
Within AT&T’s Consumer Wireline business unit, the company generated $2.36bn of revenue from broadband services in Q1 2022, an increase of 1.3% quarter-over-quarter and 6.8% year-over-year. Further details on AT&T’s broadband revenue, by connection type, reveals the following:
- Fiber: $1.11bn of fiber broadband revenue, increasing 6.2% quarter-over-quarter and 24.7% year-over-year
- Non-Fiber: $1.24bn of non-fiber broadband revenue, decreasing -2.7% quarter-over-quarter and -5.3% year-over-year
During the quarter, AT&T gained 5k net broadband subscribers, bringing its total broadband subscriber count to 13.9 million (14.1 million including DSL connections). However, AT&T’s broadband operating trends differ significantly between fiber and non-fiber connections. Specifically, during Q1 2022, AT&T gained 289k fiber broadband subscribers and lost 284k non-fiber broadband subscribers.
Note: as of Q1 2022, AT&T’s broadband connections and net adds exclude DSL.
Fiber Broadband Subscribers
AT&T ended Q1 2022 with 6.3 million fiber broadband subscribers, an increase of 1.1 million subscribers year-over-year. Indeed, this represents a 21% gain in fiber broadband subscriber count, as compared to AT&T’s 5.19 million fiber broadband subscribers as of Q1 2021.
Overall, AT&T has a fiber broadband penetration rate of 37%, on the 17 million customer locations that the company passes with fiber. Importantly, AT&T has increased its fiber broadband penetration rate by 2% over the past year, from 35% in Q1 2021.
Broadband and Fiber ARPU
AT&T’s broadband average revenue per user (ARPU), which includes both fiber and non-fiber users, reached $56.66 as of Q1 2022. Indeed, this represents a 5.9% increase year-over-year from ARPU figures of $53.52 at Q1 2021.
Within broadband ARPU, AT&T’s fiber average revenue per user (ARPU) reached $60.41 as of Q1 2022. In turn, this represents a 3.0% increase year-over-year from fiber ARPU figures of $58.65 at Q1 2021.
Furthermore, AT&T notes that its gross addition intake fiber ARPU is in the $65 to $70 range. As such, AT&T expects its overall fiber ARPU to continue to improve going forward, driven by customers rolling-off promotional pricing and taking up higher speed tiers.
Fiber Deployment Targets
At AT&T’s 2022 Analyst & Investor Day, the company indicated its plans to increase its fiber broadband footprint as follows:
- Passings of ~3.5 to 4 million customer locations annually, for the next several years, with fiber broadband
- Expand fiber broadband footprint to cover 30 million customer locations by year-end 2025. Specifically, this coverage includes 25+ million consumer locations, 4 million small businesses, and 1 million enterprise locations
AT&T Business Wireline – Q1 2022
As of March 31, 2022, AT&T’s business wireline network serves nearly 2.5 million customers such as large enterprises, government agencies, and small businesses. Also, AT&T states that its fiber footprint expansion is allowing the company to capture more opportunities in core transport and connectivity services.
Overall, the company has brought lit fiber to 675k+ U.S. business buildings, enabling high-speed fiber connections to ~3 million U.S. business customer locations. More broadly, 9.5+ million business customer locations nationwide are within 1.0k feet of AT&T fiber.
