During AT&T's quarterly earnings call, CEO John Stankey highlighted the remarkable success of FirstNet, the company's dedicated service for first responders, as a key factor in the carrier's appeal to the business sector and its continued growth prospects.

"We continue to build out a connectivity portfolio with real long-term growth opportunity," Stankey said, emphasizing the impact of FirstNet's prioritized service for first responders. "This prioritized service for first responders shows what we're able to accomplish when we focus on growing our business in areas where we have traditionally under-indexed."

CFO Pascal Deroches echoed this sentiment, stating, "We believe our 5G and fiber expansion presents plenty of growth opportunities. We're already seeing this in some of the parts of our broader Business Solutions results today. A great example is FirstNet, where wireless connections grew about 320,000 sequentially."

With an additional 320,000 net connections during the first quarter, FirstNet provided a total of approximately 5.9 million connections to public safety subscribers by the end of March, according to AT&T.

During the same period, the number of public safety agencies using FirstNet increased from 27,500 to about 28,000, marking steady growth in adoption.

However, the most significant event during the quarter was the Feb. 22 outage that impacted NPSBN public safety subscribers across the U.S., though not all agencies experienced problems. Little is known about the cause of the outage, except that AT&T has emphasized publicly that it was not the result of a cyberattack.

AT&T has not provided further information publicly about the cause of the outage or specifics about the measures taken to prevent a similar issue in the future.

"I'm upset that we had it," Stankey expressed during the call. "It's unfortunate we had it. The entire team feels responsible for it. We know we can do better. We've put in place an awful lot of steps to ensure that we do better moving forward. I think I'm confident that we have done that. And I feel like we can operate better than what we exhibited on that particular morning."

Despite the challenges posed by the outage, AT&T remains committed to enhancing its services and ensuring the reliability of FirstNet for public safety agencies across the country.