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

• AT&T operates 38 Internet data centers worldwide
• AT&T’s MPLS network has 4,000+ nodes in 187 countries
• AT&T’s optical network has 634,755 wavelength miles of 40 Gbps
• http://ww.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=5718