AT&T suspends superfast broadband plans Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief executive The biggest fixed-line telecoms group in the US on Wednesday said it would suspend plans to roll out superfast fibre broadband in 100 American cities, in the first significant corporate retaliation to President Barack Obama's calls for tough new rules to enshrine net neutrality. Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief executive, said the group could not "go out and invest that kind of money deploying fibre to 100 cities" without "knowing under what rules those investments will be governed." "We think it is prudent to just pause and make sure we have line of sight and understanding as to what those rules would look like," he added. The move was a direct response to Mr Obama's calls for broadband providers to be reclassified as a type of public utility, giving the US telecoms watchdog sweeping new powers to enforce "net neutrality" - the idea that all internet traffic should be treated equally without fast lanes or tolls. In April AT&T announced plans to rollout its U-verse GigaFiber service to 100 cities and municipalities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. However, the company has not yet given a firm commitment to lay fibre in the vast majority of the 100 cities, which it describes as "potential metros," and has said the plans are not expected to affect capital investment in 2014. It also recently trimmed its capital investment estimates for 2015, suggesting it is not planning an accelerated rollout next year either. Under Mr Obama's plans, groups such as AT&T would be reclassified as "common carriers," giving the Federal Communications Commission the clout to push through new rules designed to protect an open internet. However, existing common carriers are also subject to price regulation. Although Mr Obama has said the FCC should "forbear" from regulating rates, the telecoms groups say they cannot make big investments if there is the chance that future administrations or federal politicians will introduce price caps that will hurt their rate of return. We think it is prudent to just pause and make sure we have line of sight and understanding as to what those rules would look like Randall Stephenson, AT&T chief executive "Reclassifying the internet as a utility-like telecom service . . . would set the industry back decades, and threaten the private sector investment that is critically needed to ensure that the network can meet surging demand," the Telecommunications Industry Association said in response to Mr Obama's plans. Separately, Mr Stephenson said AT&T was interested in exploring the acquisition of the Mexican assets of Nextel, which has 2.8m subscribers in the country. Last week the group announced it was buying Iusacell as part of a big expansion into Mexico. However, he said the group did not need to buy the assets being sold by telecoms entrepreneur Carlos Slim. "We believe we have found a path that gets us a nice scalable growth platform without the América Móvil assets," he said. "If things materialise over time and those assets look attractive we would obviously have to look at them, but we really don't need the America Movil assets to be successful," he added.