AT&T's Gigabit Smokescreen

Yesterday AT&T announced it would examine 100 cities and municipalities in the U.S., including 21 metropolitan areas, for introduction of gigabit fiber. Taken on its face, the announcement is the company's response to Google Fiber. But many were quick to note AT&T has promised nothing. Karl Bode at DSLReports went so far as to call AT&T's announcement a giant bluff. "Ever since Google Fiber came on the scene, AT&T's response has been highly theatrical in nature. What AT&T would have the press and public believe is that they're engaged in a massive new deployment of fiber to the home service. What's actually happening is that AT&T is upgrading a few high-end developments where fiber was already in the ground (these users were previously capped at DSL speeds) and pretending it's a serious expansion of fixed-line broadband. It's not. At the same time AT&T is promising a massive expansion in fixed line broadband, they're telling investors they aren't spending much money on the initiative, because they aren't. AT&T's focus is on more profitable wireless. 'Gigapower' is a show pony designed to help the company pretend they're not being outmaneuvered in their core business by a search engine company."

Comments

this is just too much.

[nimbius]

If you expect me to believe this articles summary, that the worlds largest telecommunications monopoly and government spy against American citizens is lying about their services or speeds, then you clearly dont underst42t2$T%Y%[NO CARRIER]

Re:this is just too much.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

AT&T's new ad motto: "You want more fiber? Eat cabbage!"

Applause for Google

[DMJC]

I applaud Google for actually fixing the problem in the USA. It serves AT&T and the other telco companies in America right, for taking $200 billion of government money and delivering nothing for it.

Re:Applause for Google

[dloyer]

Verizon Fios works great... As long as you dont want to watch Netflix...

If you actually want to make use of all those megabits you bought, then well...

Our Netflix has been rebuffing more and more, even with a direct wired connection between the player and the router.

Re:Applause for Google

[Charliemopps]

Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.

AT&T is currently trying to sell off as much of these low-density customers as possible because the regulations over telecoms make them far less profitable than what the unregulated cable providers offer. They're also lobbying to get themselves unregulated, which may seem fair at first, but when you realize that large portions of the country would quickly lose phone service it doesn't seem that fair at all.

Not that I'll defend AT&T. They suck for more reasons than just this. But telecoms in general are definitely in a hard place right now due to unregulated competitors like Google and the Cable providers. Force Google to provide phone service to everyone in that particular territory like the telecom is and you'll see googles rates shoot up to about the same place AT&T is at right now.

Re:Applause for Google

[crtreece]

Have you tried routing your traffic through a VPN? I hear Netflix works a lot better when your ISP isn't able to identify and throttle their traffic.

Re:Applause for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.

If you're going to bash a legitimate attempt to introduce a modicum of competition to US broadband, you should at least use credible numbers. By concentrating on urbanized areas, Google is ignoring almost 20% of the country.

If you want to live 20 miles from the nearest intersection, low bandwidth may be one of the sacrifices you have to make.

Re:Applause for Google

[bobbied]

They are worlds better than the Cable company.... I used to be down for days with the cable provider because somebody on my block insisted on handing out DHCP addresses for some reason. Their tech support guys couldn't seem to figure out who it was. I finally got tired of them and jumped on FiOS when it first came out.

My connection has been rock solid since. I've had maybe 3 outages that where not my fault in 8 years, and two of those where because of the cheap router the provided was too unstable. I just went and got my own hardware and ditched that horrible Actiontec junk.

However, they are the absolute most expensive for the bandwidth you get. They filter/firewall residential DHCP service to keep you from running servers (http, https, ftp etc) but they don't tell you this directly. Also, they have pretty crappy traffic management so even though I pay for 25/25Mbps connection, I can pretty much count on only getting that when speed checking on their servers. Any real traffic can never approach that, even in aggregate.

So I don't recommend Verizon very highly either. Even if it is the lesser of the various evils available to me.

Re:Applause for Google

[rogoshen1]

you can port that number to anything of your choosing :)

google voice is especially nice, since you can make your phone carrier a commodity via forwarding. IE: port primary number to google voice, get burner/landline whatever, and then just have google voice forward your primary number to whatever number you get from the new provider. it breaks caller-ID and confuses people regarding your callback number, but it's a small price to pay.

Small anecdote: I was using straighttalk wireless, and had an issue with their soviet era website (I have zero patience for companies that make it difficult for me to pay my bill.. seriously, i'm fucking trying to give you my money.. ). So, thanks to call forwarding I was able to drop them post-haste and switch to a different provider without losing a beat (or worrying about notifying people of a number change.).

And all this after we have paid them to do it...

[number6x]

AT&T has already been given Billions of dollars in tax incentives to deliver fiber optic cable based internet to your house.

According to the incentive plans these high speed internet connections should already be installed and functioning for pretty much every American at speeds averaging 45 Mbps upload and download. Every American taxpayer, that is not a provider of internet infrastructure, has taken on the burden of $2000.00 more in taxes in order to offset the incentives gives to AT&T and the baby bells.

Do you have your low cost, high speed fiber yet?

Favourite quote

[Mr_Silver]

My favourite quote comes from Karl Bode of DSLReports:

Before you get too excited, you need to understand that this is a bluff of immense proportion. It's what I affectionately refer to as "fiber to the press release."

Re:And what's Google *promising*?

[DocSavage64109]

I don't know what's up with all the anti-google fiber AC posts, but here is my google fiber speed test from when they installed it a couple months back.

Re:cherry pick profitable areas

[DocSavage64109]

Like Google isn't doing the same thing. They announce years in advance and do nothing but cherry pick profitable areas. How many actual subscribers are in Google's territory?

Sorry, but I live in the hood and have google fiber, and my friends live in an even worse area (near 37th and Prospect) and also have google fiber. They aren't just cherry picking the nice areas.

I can order "Giga" power... but havent

[_RiZ_]

I live in Austin and can order "Giga" power currently with a current top speed of 300/300. Its been available in my neighborhood, a recent development in an established area, for a few months, but I haven't ordered. They have a 1TB download cap per month and in the $70.00 variant, they are using deep packet inspection in order to send targeted ads towards you. They have a more expensive option, $99.00 a month + install, where they don't examine your packets, but they have already lost me. I am sure Google will also utilize deep packet inspection and for some reason, I trust them more. I have TWC currently with a 50/5 plan that is supposed to be upgraded this summer with no additional costs. They haven't announced speeds yet but Im guessing they are going to be close in nature. Good to see competition working in the ATX.

Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it..

[ausekilis]

I know someone that recently moved to Austin. On the side of their house is a little box that says "AT&T Fiber". When they called AT&T to ask about internet service: "I'm sorry, we don't have service in your area".

I guess it could be fast if they knew where there infrastructure was in the first place...

AT&T needs to get their sh!t together

[scoticus]

So what if they got fiber to everyone, everywhere? They would still be a nightmare to deal with. Business class is a joke; slow speeds, charging the customer for an onsite visit to fix AT&T problems (assuming they don't just tell you to fix it yourself), about a dozen different phone numbers to pick from and a truly epic automated phone-tree when trying to get support, etc. Home service isn't much better. I had U-verse a couple of years ago when they first rolled it out to my neighborhood. 24mb down, 3mb up. Worked pretty well, except with streaming services. I eventually went back to the cable company (faster and cheaper). Last week, some AT&T sales reps knocked on my door, claiming they had just added new connection to my neighborhood. I asked, "U-verse?" They said yes. I told them I had that a couple of years ago and they looked totally stumped. They were not even aware that U-verse was already well established and that half of my complex already used it. Just for fun, I checked the website to see what upgrades they may have made. LOL, now the max U-verse speed in my neighborhood is *slower* than what I had previously. AT&T can promise whatever they want, but until I can see it, I will absolutely not believe it.

Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it..

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T was given billions of dollars to deliver broadband based on at least one leg of fiber to at least one home in each census tract in the subsidized area.

My census tract has ONE subdivision where AT&T vDSL is available (DSL from a fiber-fed, single-shelf, 4-card VRAD hosting 192 homes), yet AT&T is legally allowed to shade in the entire census tract (over 2000 homes) on the map and tell government that "this census tract has fiber coverage per our agreement."

The only reason 192 homes have access is because that maximizes revenue for the smallest VRAD they install on the lowest-provision fiber feed.

Typical AT&T

[slapout]

Sounds like the way they responded to Verizon. When Verizon started bragging about their 3G coverage, AT&T started running commercials showing their own 2G coverage.

Re:Att does that

[sjames]

They've been promising that one since the '70s. The closest they ever got was offering ISDN (in limited areas) for an arm and a leg that might one day be capable of carrying video (at 128Kbps max).

The accoustic modem was invented as an end run around them because they refused to allow anything to be connected to the phone line that they didn't approve, and they weren't approving modems. The modem itself was an end run around their refusal to offer data lines.

We've been sneaking the future past their gatekeeper for 50 years.