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Careful: Shortage fears can lead to over-ordering and create a real shortage. Unless people panic, the problem is unlikely to be more than a few weeks delay in an order. Tan's comment in the financial call ("We're also working on resolving a few potential supply constraints in this particular segment." Details below) is likely circulating in the industry, and this article might. The instinctive action is to panic and double order, which is a pattern we see in chips on a regular basis.

Broadcom is the largest supplier of chips for both DSL & cable. The comment surprised me because the primary foundry, TSMC, is missing sales targets and generally has capacity. I haven't seen any huge increase in demand for broadband chips. Broadband subscriber growth in Europe and the United States is modest. Liberty Global is just getting started on increasing their cable coverage. Deutsche Telekom is two years behind schedule on it's big vector expansion. 

China added an unbelievable 50M fiber connections in 2015 and Hock says that trend is continuing.

March's 2.65M new subscribers at China Mobile is almost certainly a broadband record. I don't remember anything close. I checked 10 years of data from China Telecom, by far the world's largest broadband provider and didn't find a peer. Most of them are on fiber. China Mobile consolidated wireline subsidiary China Tietong and now is going full speed ahead.  China Telecom added 3m to 116M; China Unicom 1.1M to 73M. Add 18M cable modems and a few small players and the current Chinese subscriber base is over 270M. 

Most new Chinese connections are on fiber: China added 50M fiber subs in 2015 and entered 2016 with 130M fibered. China Mobile consolidated wireline subsidiary China Tietong and now is going full speed ahead. With 800M mobile customers, they have plenty of prospects. 

Q1 in the U.S. was 1.1M 

Update 7/22 Removed total of fiber customers. Looking at new data, I'm not sure how many are fiber home and how many fiber/DSL and didn't want to provide a figure. 

"Executives estimate that eventually AT&T could get by with one-third fewer workers," and, "senior executives say shrinking the work force by 30 percent is not out of the question." Quentin Hardy buried those quotes in a New York Times article. 30% of AT&T's 280,000 employees is over 80,000. My guess is that 50,000-60,000 is more likely, but I believe even 50,000 would be the largest cutback since Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. I hope this story will prove inaccurate but the sources are solid. In addition, moves like this may be necessary for AT&T to increase profits. 

Randall and his team have often seen trends before the rest of us. They are now cutting back to prop up earnings for a few years and get the stock price up. The analytic question is why and how. I have some of that below but I'd welcome opinions.

This is one of the biggest telecom stories of the decade and no one picked it up. When I mentioned it in an article, I got a disbelieving email from a senior executive at AT&T. The New York Times could have made a mistake, but Hardy is a veteran reporter who had more than one source. 

CEO Randall Stephenson in the same article preached the importance for AT&T workers to "Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited."

Cable added 1,000,000 DSL/telco fiber 10,000. The data below are from Bruce Leichtman, who has been consistently accurate. The trend to cable is clear in the 50M homes that are still running DSL versions that are ten years out of date. AT&T & Verizon are doing fine in U-Verse and FiOS territory but are getting clobbered elsewhere.

DSL beats cable in Canada, France, and England. The U.S. policy types who say a cable monopoly is almost inevitable are uninformed. AT&T & Verizon have decided to go wireless-only across about 25% of their homes. They virtually stopped investment in those areas and have been very open with Wall Street about their plans. The wireline business is profitable in those areas but wireless-only makes more money. Or so they expect. 

China Mobile added 2.65M new wired subscribers in March.

Scrooge Verizon! AT&T did the right thing, offering $5 and $10 packages for the poor. Anyone in the food stamp program qualifies. Speeds are 10 megabits down where AT&T can deliver that speed, ~75% of their homes. It's 3 megabits or 5 megabits where that's the fastest AT&T can provide. Where AT&T doesn't have DSL (about 10%,) they do not offer discounted wireless. Of course a higher speed is preferable, but this is decent for a basic service. About 40M Americans are eligible for food stamps. More than a third of them live in AT&T territory.

With HD TV looking pretty good these days at 3 megabits, people will be able to access 90% or more of all Internet functionality. The main thing that is impractical at those speeds is keeping lots of music and video in the cloud. I'm finding that very convenient, especially because Amazon offers unlimited storage for $55.year. I have 6 terabytes now backed up. 

It works, finally. As always, the telcos were cautious and the vendors promised too much. The dam has broken now, with BT going at 3M homes passed each year. http://bit.ly/BThalffast CEO Patterson will keep going until “almost all” Brits can get what he’s calling ultrafast broadband.

AT&T looks to be the next big order, millions of lines with fiber to the basement and G.fast to each apartment. http://bit.ly/GfastATT. Chunghwa in Taiwan is covering almost the entire country. In Australia, Parliament is debating how much of the National Broadband network should switch to G.fast. Rio de Janeiro, Panama, Belgium, and Switzerland are on the way.  

Much more at Gfastnews.com

Software unbundling could add 100 megabits to typical speeds in England. BT has just committed to 10M lines of G.fast in the next four years and "most of the country" soon after that. They are talking speeds of "up to 330 megabits" rather than the 500-800 now proven for G.fast from the local distribution point. Instead, they will put the DSLAMs in existing cabinets and save. 

Cioffi, who invented vectored DSL, believes using software unbundling would allow 100 megabits faster speed. Alternatively, you can extend the reach at a given speed. Traditional unbundling shares the physical lines in the bundle. Today's technology - vectoring and G.fast - provides much higher speeds but is very sensitive to other signals in the same bundle. The incumbents are saying hardware unbundling is now undesirable. They prefer to control everything and sell bitstream access.

ASSIA's multitenant software allows multiple companies to manage the parameters for each customer and troubleshoot many problems, The carrier would manage the physical network including the vectoring noise cancellation. Each company would have a management console and could support their own customers directly.  

BT's current plan is to run G.fast in frequencies from 22 MHz to 106 MHz. That leaves 0-17 MHz for other companies running older VDSL on unbundled loops. If the companies could agree that all would use the BT G.fast local loop, British homes would get 100 megabits more speed. BT would be able to use frequencies 2 MHz to 106 MHz rather than 22 to 106 MHz

Africa in 2015 has ~400M people with mobiles despite no signal where almost a third of the population live. Ericsson counts 170M smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 and expects a remarkable 500M more in the next five years. 3G coverage in Q1 2016 is only 43% (GSMA) but increasing rapidly. The first map, from Afterfibre, very colorfully slows the emerging fiber networks. (Red are projected.) The third, from Paul Hamilton, has similar data but less color. It's easy to see the fibre desert in Central Africa. #2 is from the remarkable Steve Song, showing the undersea cables. Almost all have been built in the last five years. South Africa is served by five cables; Kenya and most of West Africa by three. Prices are a fraction of what satellite used to charge but in many places still very high. Larger versions below.