Saturday, April 23, 2022

AT&T posts growth in postpaid mobility and fiber

AT&T reported Q1 2022 revenue of $38.1 billion versus $43.9 billion in the year-ago quarter, down 13.3% reflecting the impact of divested businesses, mainly U.S. video in the third quarter of 2021 and Vrio in the fourth quarter of 2021, as well as lower Business Wireline revenues. The decreases were partially offset by higher Mobility revenues and, to a lesser extent, higher WarnerMedia, Consumer Wireline and Mexico revenues. Excluding impacts of the U.S. Video business and Vrio from the prior-year quarter, revenues were $38.1 billion, up 1.6%. First-quarter net income attributable to common stock was $4.8 billion, or $0.65 per diluted common share, versus $7.5 billion, or $1.02 per diluted common share, in the year-ago quarter. 

First-quarter Communications revenues were $28.9 billion, up 2.5% year over year due to increases in Mobility and Consumer Wireline more than offsetting a decline in Business Wireline. Operating contribution was $7.0 billion, down 5.4% year over year, with operating income margin of 24.3%, compared to 26.4% in the year-ago quarter.

“Our momentum in growing customer relationships is reaching historical levels,” said John Stankey, AT&T CEO. “We had our best first quarter for postpaid phone net adds in more than a decade and our fiber broadband net adds remain consistently strong. Our results, including free cash flow, are in line with our expectations toward delivering on the full-year guidance provided at our recent Analyst Day.”

“AT&T has entered a new era, meeting this opportunistic moment from a position of flexibility and strength thanks to our evolving networks, enhanced customer experience, growing 5G and fiber customer base and a much stronger balance sheet. And we continue to make good consistent progress on our journey to becoming America’s best broadband provider.”

Some highlights

Mobility

  • Revenues were up 5.5% year over year to $20.1 billion due to higher service and equipment revenues. Service revenues were $14.7 billion, up 4.8% year over year, driven by subscriber growth. Equipment revenues were $5.4 billion, up 7.3% year over year, driven by increased sales of higher priced smartphones. Total net adds were 5.5 million including:
  • 965,000 postpaid net adds, which excludes impacts of the 3G network shutdown of 900,000 that were reflected as adjustments to the subscriber base consistent with historical practice, with:
  • 691,000 postpaid phone net adds
  • 62,000 postpaid tablet and other branded computing device net adds
  • 212,000 other net adds
  • 113,000 prepaid phone net adds
  • Postpaid churn was 0.94% versus 0.93% in the year-ago quarter.
  • Postpaid phone churn was 0.79% versus 0.76% in the year-ago quarter.
  • Prepaid churn was less than 3%, with Cricket substantially lower.
  • Postpaid phone-only ARPU was $54.00, down 0.2% versus the year-ago quarter, due to the impacts of promotional discount amortization.

Business Wireline

  • Revenues were $5.6 billion, down 6.7% year over year due to lower demand for legacy voice and data services and a strategic decision to deemphasize non-core services. 
  • AT&T Business serves nearly 2.5 million customers, from the largest global companies and government agencies to small businesses. More than 675,000 U.S. business buildings are lit with fiber from AT&T, enabling high-speed fiber connections to approximately 3 million U.S. business customer locations. Nationwide, more than 9.5 million business customer locations are on or within 1,000 feet of AT&T fiber.

Consumer Wireline

  • Revenues were $3.2 billion, up 2.0% year over year due to gains in broadband more than offsetting declines in legacy voice and data services and other services. Broadband revenues increased 6.8% due to fiber growth of 24.7%, partially offset by non-fiber revenue declines of 5.3%.
  • Total broadband gains, excluding DSL, were 5,000, reflecting AT&T Fiber net adds of 289,000, mostly offset by losses in non-fiber services. 
  • AT&T Fiber now has the ability to serve 17 million customer locations.

https://about.att.com/story/2022/q1-earnings.html

Amazon Aurora Serverless delivers fast scaling for databases

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next generation of Amazon Aurora Serverless capable of scaling database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. Instead of doubling capacity every time a workload must scale, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 continuously monitors database activity and adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources an application needs. 

Customers  pay for the capacity they consume, which AWS says can save up to 90% of database costs when compared to the cost of provisioning for peak capacity. 

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 inherits the previous version's capabilities for high availability, performance, and resiliency, with low latency and fast querying.

“Amazon Aurora is the first relational database built from the ground up for the cloud. Today, more than a hundred thousand customers choose to run their database workloads on Amazon Aurora because it delivers the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at one-tenth the cost,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. 

https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/serverless.



Oracle Cloud boosts its VMware Solution with AMD EPYC

The latest release of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI's) VMware Solution, which is targeted at leading enterprises in finance and banking, retail, telecommunication, manufacturing, government, and global systems integrators, is adding the following features:

  • New E4 Dense bare metal AMD EPYC processor powered Compute shapes
  • Support for OCI File Storage as secondary storage that scales to 8 exabytes
  • Shielded VMware Instances to prevent ransomware attacks
  • Integration with OCI Monitoring and OCI Notification services using email, PagerDuty, and Slack
  • VMware product validations for vRealize Cloud Management, Site Recovery Manager, Horizon, and Tanzu.
  • Greater flexibility with E4 Dense AMD EPYC processor Compute shapes

OCI is releasing three new E4 Dense Compute shapes for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with AMD EPYC processors available in 32-, 64-, and 128-core configurations to provide a more cost-effective path to the public cloud. 

The Third Gen AMD EPYC processors offer a base clock frequency of 2.55 GHz and a max boost (maximum frequency achievable by any single core on the processor under normal operating conditions for server systems) of up to 3.5 GHz and up to 256 MB of L3 cache. These instances provide up to 2 TB of RAM, 100 Gbps of overall network bandwidth, and 54.4 TB of raw NVMe internal disk.

“AMD EPYC processors have enabled efficient and high-performance cloud computing solutions at OCI with the E4 instance launched in 2021, and now with the new E4 Dense instances we are growing the types of solutions powered by EPYC processors, like the newest Oracle Cloud VMware Solution,” said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president of cloud business at AMD. “Customers will not only have an easier path to the cloud for certified VMware workloads, but they will get the performance they expect from OCI compute shapes powered by AMD EPYC processors. We’re thrilled to work with OCI and VMware and look forward to growing customer adoption.”

https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/announcing-the-oracle-cloud-vmware-solution-spring-release



Aligned opens massive data center campus in Chicago

Aligned Data Centers completed first-phase construction of a new hyperscale data center campus in Chicago

The new facility, Aligned ORD-01, is a 220,000 square-foot, 48 MW data center (expandable to ~60 MW) and is strategically positioned at the convergence of more than 12 metro, long haul and international fiber networks. 

The company also announced groundbreaking for a second, adjacent facility on the same 18.5-acre campus. 

The announcement comes on the heels of the Company’s new waterless hyperscale data center campus in the Phoenix Metro Area and is the third deployment of approximately 270 MW of planned new development for Aligned in 2022.

“Chicago’s centralized location, long-haul connectivity, and access to renewable energy options make it an ideal geostrategic destination for hyperscalers and multinational enterprises to deploy their mission-critical infrastructure,” states Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned. “Bringing one hyperscale data center online the same day that we break ground on a second facility is a testament not only to the demand for Aligned’s adaptive and sustainable data center platform, but to our ability to deliver infrastructure at the velocity our customers need it, even in a supply-and power-constrained market such as Chicago, anywhere in the world.”

https://www.aligneddc.com/chicago/

U.S State Department revises its subsea cable licensing procedure

The U.S. State Department has revised the procedures for its review of submarine cable landing license applications.

The State Department’s review will begin after the the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector completes its national security and law enforcement review of an application and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) notifies the Commission of the Committee’s final recommendation on the application.

The State Department’s revised procedures are separate from the Commission’s public interest review of submarine cable landing license applications, which includes seeking feedback from the expert Executive Branch agencies, including the Committee, on any national security, law enforcement, foreign policy, or trade policy issues that the Commission should consider as part of its public interest review of applications from applicants with reportable foreign ownership.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/revised-procedure-state-department-review-subcable-applications

SpaceX signs first airline for Starlink

 JSX, a U.S. regional airline operating a fleet of Embraer jets from private terminals, will be the first to offer Starlink satellite service as an onboard amenity.

The service is expected to launch this year.

https://www.jsx.com