AT&T at NSR/BCG Conference: Strategic Connectivity Vision

On Thursday, March 26, 2026, at the NSR/BCG Global Connectivity Leaders Conference in New York, AT&T (NYSE:T) laid out its strategic vision, focusing on technological advancements and future growth. The discussion, led by AT&T’s CTO Yigal, highlighted both the company’s strengths and challenges, emphasizing customer-centric development, network convergence, and AI readiness.

AT&T is advancing its network infrastructure with two major platforms:

AI Adoption:

Satellite Technology:

AI-Ready Network:

6G and Edge Computing:

AI in Network Operations:

6G and Continuous Innovation:

Satellite and D2C:

For a deeper dive into AT&T’s strategic initiatives, refer to the full transcript below.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: Thank you so much for joining us. As you guys know, Yigal is the Chief Technology Officer at AT&T. A combination of scheduling conflicts and war and airplanes and government funding have left us doing this virtually. We really appreciate AT&T making the effort to be part of our conference again this year. Thank you, Yigal, for doing this.

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: Thank you for having me. Good morning, everyone.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: Yigal, I’m here joined on stage with my BCG counterpart, Simonas. I’ll do maybe the first part, and Sim will do the second part. I guess, you know, Yigal, I know you’re at an off-site right now, but, you know, one of the things that John Stankey, you know, really made a priority at AT&T was kind of slimming down and simplifying the AT&T business. I think that we heard that some of your competitors earlier today wanna follow that playbook. I guess from a technology standpoint, you know, what are the new priorities at AT&T? Is it wireless coverage? Is it wireless capacity? Is it fiber network availability? Is it fixed wireless access?

Is it, you know, slimming down the business even further through efficiency initiatives? You know, what are the kind of things that a guy in your seat is working on right now to fulfill the AT&T vision?

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Maybe before I start answering that first question, I need to call everyone’s attention to our safe harbor statement. I think you’re seeing this on the screen. It says that some of the things that I’m gonna share today are forward-looking and as such, they’re subject to risk and uncertainty, and the results may differ materially. I also want to remind everyone that we are in a quiet period of Auction 113, and as a result of this, unfortunately, I won’t be able to discuss that. Now that we got that off the table, we can-

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: Well-

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: I can try to address your question.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: That was a rookie mistake on my part, Yigal, and so I feel bad about me.

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: No, it’s okay.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: I’m glad we got that out of the way. Thank you.

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: Exactly. That’s the important thing. Well, I think, Dave, obviously, I’m sure you’re anticipating the answer that says it’s all important. All of the characteristic of the network that you described are important. All need to be addressed, and obviously, we are addressing all of them. The way we think about this is like everything else in AT&T, is through the lens of our customers or customer-first perspective. If you ask customers, I’m sure they’re gonna tell you that the first thing or the most important for them is to actually get on the Internet. So they’re able to make a phone call or send a text message or do an email or whatever they need to do over the Internet. I think they also care about consistency. Is their experience over the network consistent?

Things like dropped calls. AT&T has the lowest dropped call rate in the U.S. That kind of tells you about how we think about reliability. We are all privileged here to serve first responders. The first responders of America. We’re building and operating the FirstNet network. That tells you that the bar is even higher when it comes to reliability and how we think about this. Now, at the same time, you mentioned capacity. Capacity is really important with the growing demand for connectivity and AI and video all traversing the wireless network. As we’re going through our wireless modernization, think about the fact that we are putting to work all of our mid-band. We are simplifying the mid-band spectrum. We are simplifying the configuration in all of our cell sites.

We are opening up the architecture so that can help us to drive efficiency up and cost down. So this is how we think about all of those characteristics and how we’re serving customers. I think that it’s also an interesting optimization problem. As such, AI is a great capability to help us to think through this in terms of how do you bring in different attributes as customer experience, devices, reliability, coverage, capacity, other use cases, and how that helps us to guide our investment and how we’re thinking about proportionally investing in the various capabilities that you mentioned.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: Thank you for that, Yigal. Those are the kind of the what’s, but I’m interested in a little bit on the how’s. You know, I think that one of the bigger events that’s occurred with AT&T, and there’s been a couple, one big one was the acquisition of the fiber asset from Lumen. Another was the acquisition of Spectrum from EchoStar. I think that there’s a lot of question about how these pieces fit together. The fiber, the Fixed Wireless Access, and the wireless network, and which one takes priority. I’m assuming your answer is gonna be everything takes priority. But how, what is the real answer and how do you come to that answer in terms of what you decide to spend your time and energy on?

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: Yeah. Great question, Dave. Maybe zooming out a little bit to where you started. What we’re actually doing is building two scaled network platform, right? We have a modern, open, nationwide, 5G wireless network, and we’re also building a metropolitan multi-gig fiber network that is already covering 36 million living units, which no one else has that size of a fiber network and no one is building at the pace that we’re building our fiber network. That leads to the true benefits that are two in my mind. One is owner economics. Our ability to build and operate both a wireless and a fiber network gives us a lot of flexibility in owner economics. The other thing is actually supporting our overall strategy, which is all around convergence.

The way we’re thinking about this is that we have a converged network strategy. One of the things we like to say about our network is that we’re actually building a fiber network that has different access technology hanging off it. Think about the ability for us to optimize our fiber routes and building in a way that supports three or more distinct use cases, consumer broadband, wireless backhauling, enterprise services. The magic doesn’t stop there. Historically, all of those services, the way they would converge in our core network was deep in our core backbone. They reroute or traversed our technical spaces or central offices through different architecture and different infrastructure. We are changing this through our network modernization. We are pushing out all of that convergence to the edge of our network, to each one of our central offices.

Now you can imagine how each one of our services is actually running on the same converged and intelligent architecture and infrastructure. Now let’s talk about fixed wireless because you brought this up. Clearly, when you have fiber assets in 32 markets, that will always be our lead offer. This is what we wanna take to our customer because I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with the fact that fiber is the best broadband technology. It’s symmetrical, it’s reliable, it’s doable. However, there are different scenarios in which either we don’t have fiber assets, or we know that we’re gonna come into a new neighborhood or a new area, but that’s going to take us a year or two to build our fiber then, or we need a catch product to get people off our corporate infrastructure, small-medium businesses.

There’s an interesting segment of customers that would prefer to go with other type of services. For all of that, we have our fixed wireless service, which is a great product addressing all of the use cases that I just mentioned. You mentioned the fact that we acquired more spectrum. In a matter of weeks, we were able to push out through a short-term spectrum management lease all of the additional 3.45 throughout our network through 23,000 cell site. That added capacity, that opened up a lot of new geographies and created a more addressable market for fixed wireless capabilities.

Dave, BCG Counterpart, BCG: There’s been a conversation here a little bit today, some mixed feelings about the enterprise market opportunity. You know, as the largest enterprise provider in the United States today, this AI evolution from a B2B standpoint, you know, I’m an old guy. I watched the internet lead to tears with millions of bankruptcies. I saw the cloud evolve, and no one made money except Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Oracle. Now we’re talking about this new AI internet that’s supposed to be coming into being, and there’s been some players who’ve been noisy about it. I would say that AT&T and others have been more quiet about it. Is it a real thing?

Is it a construction project that’s a one-off, or is it, something that’s real?

Yigal, Chief Technology Officer, AT&T: First of all, I think we’re living in the most remarkable period, technology period that I can remember, and it’s really exciting to be part of it. To your question, I will probably take this further out a little bit than just the enterprise space. I will tell you that I don’t think we’re