AT&T Consultant Council Conference on "world domination"

I just returned from this event, the 18th annual, held May 1-3, 2008. I have to say it was one of the best conferences of its type I've ever attended. Great location, presenters, access to executives, and all in a very compact three days.

I'm including some of the notes I took from some of the sessions. We nicknamed it the "world domination conference", for reasons you'll see in the notes below.

Some of the information was especially relevant, since a major AT&T/Cingular/BellSouth merger re-organization was announced in the last couple weeks, and all the new org structures were explained here. BTW, they expect to cut $15B with this merger - wouldn't you like half of that expense reduction?!

Some of the presenters included:
Roman Pacewicz - SVP - Business Communications Services, Marketing
Chris Roy - VP - Majors and Indirect Segment Marketing (new home of the CVSG program)
Randy Tomlin - SVP - Network Services, and now head honcho of U-verse

We also had the VP of Major Markets, a VP from the GEM (government, education and medical) organization, Sales VP from Mobility (Cingular) and the Chief Economist from the LA Economic Development Corporation.

GENERAL AT&T NOTES:
(most of this from Roman Pacewicz and Chris Roy)
- $119B revenue in 2007
- 97% of the world's economy is serviced by AT&T
- 38 data centers w/w, expanding to 1M sq ft by 2010
- $30.7B in revenue Q1 2008
- 12 consecutive quarters of double-digit earnings growth

BACKBONE TECHNOLOGY
- According to AT&T, the bandwidth glut of the .com bubble is gone
- Over $1.3B investment in last three years, with $600M in 2008.
- They now have 50,000 wavelength miles of OC-768 (40Gb/s) backbone bandwidth
- Making major investments in underseas fiber, including U.S.-China
- Entire core backbone is MPLS, carrying IP, cellular, voice, everything. Noted Verizon (major competitor) still has 4 separate backbones
- In residential, 145k new U-verse (latest FTTN cable/I-net offering for home) subscribers per Q, with target of 1M by EOY 2008.

AT&T MOBILITY
- At $11.8B in Q1 '08, wireless rev is blowing everything else away, and wireless data is the exponential component - 57% mobile data growth
- Wireless quarterly revenue growth, year over year:
Q1'07=11.2% Q2=12.7% Q3=14.4% Q4=16.3% Q1'08=18.3%
NOTE: each quarter's growth is a larger % of a growing number - amazing!
- 3B cells in the world, and penetration is expected to be greater than 100% of the world's population (Italy has 135% cell phone population penetration, as people have multiple devices)
- 71.5 M AT&T wireless devices
- 3G service available in >350 markets in the U.S.
- Roaming in 145+ countries
- NOTE: Though presently the largest wireless provider in the U.S. (until Verizon and Alltel perhaps get hitched), largest in the world is China Mobile (who?). At about 400M subscribers and $51B US, they dwarf everyone: www.chinamobileltd.com

FUTURES
- Wireless data is currently 23% of traffic, expected to be 50% by 2011
- They showed charts of future wireless speeds (no time frames)
Release 7(HSPA+) - 11.5Mb/s up and 28 Mb/s down Release 8(LTE) - 100 Mb/s down (to mobile devices!)
- They acquired significant assets in the recent 700 MHz spectrum auction (previously UHF TV frequencies) - called "beachfront property" by experts - and have contiguous 100% coverage in 200 markets. A major path to 4G, 700Mhz easily penetrates buildings, which is a major source of frustration for current cellular service.
- For Fixed Mobile Access, neither WiMAX nor UMA are big plans for AT&T - they are pursuing Femtocell technology (micro cells for indoor coverage), tho they still believe in WiFi (e.g., acquiring the 7000 hotspots in Starbucks)

And last but not least...
- iPhone v2 is due out in June. The "business iPhone", it will support VPN, stronger encryption, and a development platform for biz apps.

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