There is just no ducking it anymore — AT&T has a real problem with its wireless network, and according to reports the company spent a good deal of time on its quarterly earnings conference call Thursday trying to convince investors and other followers that Ma Bell was ready to spend to fix the problems — $2 billion more throughout 2010, according to AT&T, bumping its yearly network capex spend to about $18 billion to $19 billion.
While we’ve reported on this song and dance before — AT&T talked about adding lots of backhaul at its developer day confab in Las Vegas the day before CES started — AT&T still can’t seem to bring itself to say exactly how bad its network problem is, but hey they are trying. Witness this slide from their investor presentation, which is supposed to make you feel good about how the progress is going:
I mean, the squiggly lines are all going in the right direction — but could anyone else but AT&T think they could get away with submitting a chart without numbers on the Y axis to clarify exactly what the hell they were talking about? Anyone think they could pass even an internal budget meeting with graphs without numbers?
But hey, AT&T is selling lots of devices and wireless-data revenues are up so things must be OK. Meanwhile, even as AT&T seems ready to spend enough to build a cell tower for each and every potential user, we haven’t even begun to talk about AT&T’s spectrum position, and whether or not it is sufficient to enable all this wireless growth. Our take? No squiggly lines are going to make this story go away, anytime soon.