The company says it will put the investment toward expanding fiber, 5G home internet, and satellite connectivity across the US over the next five years. It also plans on hiring “thousands” of technicians this year to support the buildout.
The partnership will allow AT&T to use Amazon Leo — the ecommerce giant’s low Earth orbit satellite network — to deliver fixed broadband services to businesses. Amazon launched its gigabit-speed Leo Ultra antenna last November, but it’s only available for commercial use for now.
The acquisition includes “substantially all” of Lumen’s consumer fiber business, according to AT&T’s announcement. The company says it will add more than 1 million fiber customers across Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and other cities as a result of the acquisition.
According to AT&T, the highest call day (through the beginning of December, because just like Spotify Wrapped, everyone’s data feed cuts off a bit early) was October 31st, and the most texts were sent on December 1st.
And as for how its data traffic compares to previous years:
Just ten years ago, we moved only 91 petabytes of data across our network each day. The leap to an exabyte marks an astonishing 1,000% increase over the past decade and more than 11,000% increase over the past 20 years
The company follows T-Mobile and Verizon in doing so. AT&T plans to buy just over $1 billion of wireless spectrum licenses from US Cellular but needs approval from the FCC, according to Reuters.
[Reuters]
Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is hunting for answers about the state of US telecom network security after the Salt Typhoon hack first reported late last year. The attack was so massive that US officials encouraged Americans to use encrypted apps to prevent their conversations from being seen by hackers. Cantwell is asking digital forensics firm Mandiant to hand over assessments behind AT&T and Verizon’s claims that their networks are now secure.
[commerce.senate.gov]
Cameron John Wagenius, aka kiberphant0m, had already pleaded guilty on two charges for hacking T-Mobile and Verizon, and could face 20 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to additional conspiracy, extortion, and identity theft charges.
Wagenius reportedly sold data stolen from Snowflake cloud storage accounts, including records for 560 million Ticketmaster customers and information from over 150 other companies, and said he’d posted hacked AT&T call logs for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Two other men, John Binns and Connor Moucka, have also been indicted in this case.
AT&T says its acquisition of Lumen, previously known as CenturyLink, will allow it to “significantly expand” its fiber internet service across major cities, like Denver, Las Vegas, Orlando, and others. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026 and includes “substantially all” of Lumen’s fiber-to-home business.
[fierce-network.com]
The ability to text an AT&T subscriber from an email address is going away on June 17th, the company has announced.
If you’ve never done that and want to try before it goes away, just enter your favorite AT&T customer’s area code and phone number, sans punctuation, followed by “@txt.att.net” or “@mms.att.net.”
The FCC investigated AT&T’s “supply chain integrity” after hackers stole customer data from a vendor’s cloud environment in January 2023. “AT&T failed to ensure the vendor: (1) adequately protected the customer information, and (2) returned or destroyed it as required by contract,” the FCC says.
AT&T also entered into a consent decree as part of the settlement.
The three-year compliance plan (PDF) and civil penalty aren’t for this April outage or a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that blocked more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.
This outage on August 22nd, 2023, caused over 400 failed 911 calls across Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin in just over an hour.
It lasted 12 hours, affected all 50 states, and cut off voice and 5G data for 125 million devices, according to an FCC investigation. The outage caused by a misconfigured network change blocked more than 92 million phones calls, including more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911 emergency services.
The agency is now referring the matter for potential violation of the FCC’s longstanding rule to do better.
[docs.fcc.gov]
