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00:00It's hard to understand the scale of this journey until you see it up close and in person at one of the connectivity hubs known as central offices. Traffic is aggregated from the different neighborhoods and then on to what it's going to call off for. Think about it as the brains of the network. It gives routing instructions in terms of where the traffic needs to go to based upon the command from your phone, your tablet, your computer. We're talking next to another room that looks sort of like this, but a little dated. With all the copper infrastructure in it. That's all getting phased out, isn't it? It is getting phased out. And but they're still I'd say about 5% of our customers are still on copper wire. Phones think, landlines think legacy DSL. And there are all sorts of regulatory requirements that limit our ability to get out of that technology quickly. So we're required to serve both the historical legacy copper technology as well as the fiber technology. So when this ends up getting phased out, you have a lot of space left. What are you planning to do with it once we decommission copper? What will happen is we're going to have access space that we're going to probably be able to monetize and sell. We recently did a transaction where we sold, we have 75 wire centers and we kept access to our infrastructure, but there was still a lot of space in the building as well as adjacent land that we were able to sell at a really attractive price because we have scaled down our investment in copper fiber doesn't just take up less space, it increases efficiency at every level. For each one of these fiber cables, they snake back to neighborhood and strand of fiber has several customers on it. It has a lot more capacity. Fiber that consumes 70% less energy than copper. Similarly, the maintenance profile of fiber is so much better. We spend 35% less on maintaining fiber. So it's a win win. It's a better product and less maintenance, less energy. Right now, there are more than 4500 central offices across the. Unless AT & T intends to cut that number down by the end of the decade. But the ones that remain will still play a critical role in the business. It's really important that you have points of backwardation to ensure that you are touching as many endpoints across the country as possible. So yes, it's expensive to have them, but they are. They also give you enormous reach across the country.

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AT&T Finds Efficiencies in Fiber Push

AT&T has begun to decommission its legacy copper networks, with the intention of completely retiring them by the end of the decade. On Bloomberg Chief Future Officer, CFO Pascal Desroches takes Lisa Abramowicz to one of the company's connectivity hubs and explains how fiber isn't just less costly to operate and maintain -- it also takes up less space, allowing AT&T to generate capital from underutilized facilities. (Source: Bloomberg)

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