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AT&T Inc. 2013 Annual Report
3
The question is: Given all of these opportunities, what are the
critical components of leadership — where do we need to excel —
to grow and create value for you, our shareowners?
The first key is a premier network
experience. I told you a year ago that the
number one story for our company in 2013
would be our network. And that turned out
to be the case; we had a breakout year —
reaching industry-leading levels of network
quality. It started with a major multi-year
initiative, called Project VIP, to deploy
high-speed connectivity on a massive
scale. When we launched this effort, we
committed to bring the most advanced
wireless service to 300 million people
across the United States. We also said
we would expand our U-verse fixed-line
broadband service to 57 million customer
locations, while delivering even faster
speeds. And we laid out plans to extend
fiber connections to an additional 1 million
business customer locations. I’m pleased to
report that we begin 2014 with these efforts
ahead of schedule. And, as our network has
expanded, we’ve also accelerated the
growth of the services that ride on it —
including launching new services in
connected cars, connected homes and
advanced mobile business solutions.
Now, we’re expanding on Project VIP —
pushing the envelope to bring high-speed
broadband connectivity to more and more
customers. For example, in Austin we’ve
launched a super-fast U-verse service
called GigaPower. Initial speeds go up to
300 Mbps, and this year we plan to increase
that to 1 Gbps — fast enough to download
25 songs in just one second. We’re looking
for opportunities to bring these types
of capabilities to more communities
in the future.
Video already is a large and fast-growing
portion of our network traffic — for
everything from entertainment to user-
generated content, conferencing and
business applications. So, we’re moving
quickly to architect and optimize our
network for video. At the same time, we’re
leading the industry by taking the first
steps to virtualize more and more of our
network functions — putting software
rather than hardware at the heart of our
network infrastructure. Doing this will cut
development time and help us get new
products to market faster. And most
important, we’ve committed to upgrading
all of our customers to new technology
by 2020 — to deliver better service, higher
speeds and more features, and do it all
faster and more efficiently. We expect
to start trials this year.
Second, an effortless customer experience
is fundamental. AT&T has a long history
of delivering personal service. Now, we’re
building on that heritage to create new
customer service platforms for a high-