Thursday, May 9, 2013

AT&T's Project VIP On Track - Small Cells and DAS


AT&T is on-track to bring LTE to 90% of its wireless footprint to year-end and Project VIP will extend the network significantly in both the wireless and wireline domains, said Bill Smith, President of AT&T Network Operations, speaking at the Jeffries 2013 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.  AT&T's CAPEX budget for 2013 is in the $21 billion range.

Some notes from his presentation.

  • Project VIP aims to reach 10,000+ macro cell sites by year-end 2015, along with 1,000 DAS and 40,000+ small cell sites.
  • Project VIP also aims to bring fiber to 1 million new business locations by year-end 2015.
  • In 2012, AT&T installed 800 distributed antenna systems and deployed 81,000 new antennas.
  • More than 90% of traffic on AT&T's wireless network is now carried of its enhanced backhaul (Ethernet)
  • AT&T now has more than 33,000 Wi-Fi hotspots.
  • AT&T's plan is to move to small cells that have UMTS + LTE + Wi-Fi

  • AT&T's network carries 43.4 petabytes on average business day