AT&T and Corning Sign Multi-Year Optical Fiber and Cable Supply Agreement Worth Over $3 Billion

C114, September 30 (Yue Ming) — According to reports, US carrier AT&T has officially announced a multi-year Corning fiber optic cable supply agreement worth more than $3 billion in total.

Under the agreement, Corning will continue to supply optical fiber and fiber optic cable products to AT&T to support the expansion of its residential broadband network. AT&T disclosed that average monthly data traffic per fiber subscriber has already surpassed 1TB, five times the 2016 level. With the continued adoption of AI applications, cloud services, high-definition video and large-scale gaming, average monthly traffic per subscriber is expected to climb to 2TB–2.5TB by 2030. AT&T plans to keep increasing investment in FTTH buildout, targeting fiber coverage of 60 million homes by 2030.

Notably, earlier this month Verizon also signed a multi-year fiber supply agreement with Corning. The contract runs through 2032, with Corning supplying more than 80 million fiber-miles to Verizon between 2027 and 2032. The order covers two major scenarios: first, expanding FTTH residential broadband coverage to support Verizon's target of 40 million to 50 million broadband access lines; and second, building a nationwide long-haul backbone network for AI supercomputing clusters to meet cloud providers' needs for inter-regional compute interconnection.

Within just one month, two leading US carriers have placed multi-billion-dollar fiber orders in succession, both choosing to lock in capacity early — a sign of concern over fiber supply in the North American market.

The trend is not limited to North America. Back in the domestic market, pricing in China Mobile's general optical cable tenders is likewise a bellwether for industry conditions. The just-concluded 2026–2027 China Mobile general cable tender covered about 2.1618 million sheath-kilometers, equivalent to 69.222 million fiber-kilometers. The bidding process was fraught with twists: the first tender failed; after the ceiling price was raised in the second tender, 17 of the 18 bidders submitted maximum-price bids, pushing the calculated average price up about 90% from the previous tender.