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AT&T Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechDirt points out that AT&T's big fiber deployment project isn't yet adding up to much. They posted a press release last week saying how they've launched fiber internet in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, and how they also plan to bring it to 38 other metro areas. But TechDirt notes a few parts they left out: "Nowhere does the company state when these connections will be delivered. Similarly nowhere does the company make clear that it's targeting mostly high-end housing developments where fiber is already in the ground, making costs negligible (the only way you could technically accomplish a deployment of this kind and magically have your CAPEX consistently drop). And while AT&T claims these improvements will reach 14 million residential and commercial locations, AT&T gives no timeline for this accomplishment. That means it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so. "
"Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists "
Thats why thyre building it, becausr it doesn't exist (yet)
Or did I miss something?
it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so.
If this is the first time you've stopped to consider ma bell as a conglomerate that does not operate in the greater common good, then i suppose 2016 is going to be a rough year. its not just AT&T thats at fault, but the schizophrenic common carrier response by internet providers in general. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've seen quite a bit of Fiber To The Press Release, but here in the RTP area of North Carolina, they're digging like crazy. Our decidedly-not-upscale neighborhood has already received the doorknob hang-tabs about excavation, and the Miss Utility painters have been around.
Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments, although they seem to have put things on hold until the new year.
I'm unimpressed with AT&T's advertising, monitoring and capping policies, but they're already having a positive effect -- last time I threatened to drop TWC, they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.
can't be all bad? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=truth+about+US
Yes, this technology is called Fiber-to-the-Press-Release
They claim that they have a fiber deployment in my city, but for the life of them they can't/won't say which neighborhoods are served. They also can't say if/when/where they are currently expanding to in my city. Makes me thing that they picked a spots where they already had fiber and the offered it to places convenient to those those locations so they can claim to support another city.
They just suddenly started drilling under people's driveways (appeared to accidentally cut through an electrical line across my street). I think after a week of construction they actually notified people by putting a flyer on their front door knobs. . .
Another characteristic of my neighborhood is that it seems to be a logical location to be the next batch of Google fiberhood sign-up areas. . .
Looks like ATT is moving at "chicken with head cut-off" speed these days. . . (at least from my perspective)
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The ATT fiber build is to replace/enhance their trunk and feeder system of copper and radio. They had to do this once the T-Mobile merger died. Copper to the home is another thing that is not necessarily in this project. Word has it, the pole to home ATT connection will be Cat grade copper (or co-ax), not fiber. Less maintenance cost to repair still less cost to install considering the terminal equipment needed vs fiber (at this time, anyway).
So, what should we do about it?
AT&T is a complete joke of a company. Crappy phone service, poor internet service. They run the IBM network and it crashes all the time. What a bunch of worthless jerk-offs.
Just got connected to fiber at my house yesterday, in rural Vermont no less. Has been available for a couple of years now. Fiber has been deployed in major cities for decades. Why this should even be news in this day and age is puzzling to me.
They yanked my chain for 7 years teasing us with UVerse. It finally came and was teh same shitty 3.0/.384 speeds that their DSL was. Charter finally ran cables down my street and I got hooked up this last weekend. Went from 3 down to 66 down. And dropped $5/month (after the initial signup deal expires!) from my bill.
AT&T is a shit company that can't die fast enough.
That's all... nothing else to see here...
Agile Artisans
You Old McDonald See'n'Say cows!!!
but what does the fox say? hmmmmm
I live near one of the cities in question. Last year, our local utilities company started a search for a fiber internet provider for the municipality. They decided they didn't want to be the provider but we needed to have one. Right now the major internet suppliers are AT&T and Comcast. The timing of this announcement makes me think they realized they were going to be driven out of town by another company pretty soon. I wonder how many other cities on the list are doing the same.
AT&T fiber is available to many single family homes in Atlanta. It is available at the street next to mine. The strange thing: They have 2 price levels. You can pay $70 per month by agreeing to let them monitor your usage/browsing habits, or pay more (~$100) for more privacy.
Contrary to public perception, AT&T is in the midst of deploying FTTX hardware as quickly as the manufacturers can supply it.
Even to those sites which have existing fiber, new hardware has to be deployed to interface to the end customer. ( I'm pretty sure you don't have any spare single mode fiber laying about the house, nor the hardware to interface with the carrier hardware )
There is also more to it than just slapping in a piece of gear and plugging it into power. Each site has battery backups and full environmental monitoring ( which requires additional hardware ) to make sure the site in question runs after it is turned up.
In top of this, even more hardware has to be installed back at the serving site and network wide for any given area to host this stuff.
I won't get into details, but any of you who work in the industry know that carrier grade hardware doesn't come cheap. Reconsider the size of the network itself and you begin to understand the scope and cost of the project. ( Many billions of dollars and untold numbers of manhours required to get it in installed, configured and turned up for customer use )
Hell, some of the manufacturers can't even supply the company with the needed hardware fast enough to deploy it.
Just in the network I help maintain, we have ~30,000 devices ( routers, switches, protocol converters, etc ) and that is just the SUPPORT network that allows other systems to monitor and communicate with the carrier hardware.
I won't sit here and shill for the company, but at least try to wrap your head around the size, scope and cost of what is being done. Epic sized projects just don't happen overnight ( and there is still the rest of the company to fund, upgrade and maintain ).
..when the unions get to it, you guys will have it. Quit pressing them man.
A couple of weeks ago a guy from AT&T knocked on my door and said they just installed fiber in my backyard. So WTF?
They are Building in chicagoland.
Seen a lot of trucks and new cables being ran. I hope they move me from copper (under ground) to fiber. In a newer area then some of the non under ground area they are building in. Just down the road.
Promises without a timeline is rhetoric only. These guys act like a married man that keeps promising his wife that he'll fix a squeak in the floor, then steps around it to make sure he doesn't hear it again.
No comment needed.
You do realize AT&T is in name only. The company was SBC. SBC changed its name to AT&T. Look it up sometime.
Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier. They want you to use cell for internet. They want to build more cell towers. It's a business decision.
You can fuck off troll.
AT&T send me a letter this week asking me to join their high speed gigabit network. No. I don't care for gigabit speeds when you can't even keep the service running for longer than a week. And when it does break your entire debugging process is to turn the modem on and off and then send a tech (all within an hour long phone call somehow). Then the techs whole debugging process is more or less the same and then after than pretending to do stuff until the next call (this process costs you an entire day). Wired service will always be crappy because when it breaks (and it will) they have no real incentive to fix it because you're just one guy. I moved everything to mobile (tv and internet) and I'm not going back.
why, it will take until the FCC crawls their back, and about 6-8 months longer, to meet their goals. seriously. it's just so hard when it's only for money, not for a reason to still live.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
things are different when the wiring in the ground is cat-3 at best, and might be lead/paper/steel in the heart of downtown.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
They "ran" fiber into my "neighborhood". So what really happened was, they put in a hub near Lee university. Then came around "selling" the residents of the area on how great the service is. /sarc/ For only $70 a month + installation fees, (re: running the actual fiber from the hub to my house via telephone poles" you get a whopping 18MB down with an amazing 4MB up connection! What a deal! /sarc/. The kid who came by trying to sell me the service just couldn't understand the concept that my cable connection was faster. I had to give him an analogy. I drive a dodge, you drive a ferrari. You COULD go 150mph down the highway, but, the state decided to put in new speed limit signs: Ferraris: 18mph, all other cars 55mph.
You do realize AT&T is in name only. The company was SBC. SBC changed its name to AT&T. Look it up sometime.
Well, no. The bell co was split up into the multitude of bells. Now they are reforming into the bell co again. What you know as AT&T today and what you formerly knew as SBC also includes other bells, like Pacific Bell. And SBC and Pacific Bell were already themselves conglomerates of smaller bells. AT&T is as good a name as anything; arguably, they should just call themselves the Bell Company again, because that's what they are again. They cover most of the households in the USA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, during the MA BELL breakup, different areas were sold off or became different companies. AT&T was one, Verizon another. Verizon does not own all the phone lines.
Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier.
Fortunately, they ran it in my neighborhood before they figured that out. And then they sold their POTS/Fiber system to Frontier. I held out for a few years with ClearWire WiMax until Sprint went tits up and pulled the plug. So I switched to FIOS. The installation went well, particularly since I pulled a Cat 5 cable to the location of the network interface. The technician was quite happy about not having to crawl through another attic dragging a cable.
One little complaint: The NID has battery backup. But evidently the fiber network does not. Because I lost my broadband during a 20 hour power outage. Damnit, even our traffic lights have battery backup!
Have gnu, will travel.
Kind of like the $9 billion they took in the 00's to provide rural broadband to the country.
They just pocketed it and did basically nothing.
Almost certainly *exactly* like that. They're probably doing it to pick up money they've gotten from the public through Congress, most likely in the term of tax breaks. It turns out that when you call something a "tax cut," the public usually doesn't notice when Congress gives a company or industry a couple of billion dollars from the public's taxes.
Like we've been telling you for the past 30 years or so. Get government out of the way and let business get to business. The capitalist way will take care of this.
We don't need any of this socialist nonsense about running fiber to every single household like we did copper last century. Why should ratepayers who can afford service have to subsidize service to poor neighborhoods and rural areas? They probably don't have computers anyhow.
Shortly after Google announced the decision to install their fiber in Raleigh-Durham area, AT&T planted the big orange conduit, then the black fiber bundles all over our neighborhoods this past summer (mostly standalone houses, about "middle income"). I even had to roll an empty cable spool out of my yard down the street to where some of their equipment was parked for a while.
U-Verse became available shortly thereafter - had an AT&T guy come to our door to offer it. Some neighbors have gotten it, and are commenting about it on a local listserv type web site, especially the ones annoyed by sloppy installations that ruined landscaping and even sprinkler systems, plus trash left by the installers. The city of Durham has contracted with a guy to chase down complaints by residents with AT&T. We still see some of the individual cables from junction boxes to houses lying alongside some streets, and a few even crossing the street. Not surprisingly, some of the listserv discussion included accounts by some of those cross-street cables being damaged by traffic, and thus losing phone/TV/Internet - duhhh.
Meanwhile my TimeWarner cable Internet speeds have gone from 30/10 Mbps this past May, when first installed, to over 200/30 Mbps - love that competition.
FWIW
Sounds like this was written by someone that isn't within their current fiber area and they're crying that they can't get faster speeds for their Netflix viewing.
I have no idea how to spell that.
They are not completely reformed back together. From what was originally AT&T has split into 3 nowadays AT&T, Qwest and Verizon http://subjunctive.net/klog/20...
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
They are not completely reformed back together. From what was originally AT&T has split into 3 nowadays AT&T, Qwest and Verizon http://subjunctive.net/klog/20...
Right, but AT&T has more land lines than either of those other guys. That's why cable and fiber have them puckered more than anyone else. DSL is relevant to them. Verizon has more retail wireless customers than AT&T, so if the land line goes away, Verizon is more powerful than AT&T...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think they exist.
Telecoms are investing in wireless networks over fiber because when the next generation of wireless mobile internet (5G) comes, it will move data faster at speeds competitive with land-based cable/DSL/Fiber, so selling those land-based internet services will get harder. Consider that 4G LTE can already move data fast enough to accommodate basic internet use (e.g. web browsing, email, basic streaming) and 5G will be faster without laying and maintaining expensive cables all over the planet. For rural areas in particular it will be much more cost-effective to reach homes with a 5G tower on a hilltop than run fiber along miles of rural roads. There were Slashdot stories from earlier this year that Verizon is already testing a 5G network and it's safe to assume AT&T is working theirs too. Mobile ISPs won't satisfy everyone though and some users will be willing to pay a premium for more bandwidth, which is why fiber is still being installed in wealthier, more densely populated neighborhoods.
Trivia: SBC took the at&t name for one reason only.
at&t is globally known, whereas SBC was known only regionally within the US.
Your post doesnt deserve a -1, but...
"Well the Clinton's tried to do it to Microsoft and even though they weren't successful the Lawsuits caused 2 stock market crashes and the end of the .com bubble .."
Attempting to split MS caused 2 stock market crashes and the end of the .com bubble?
Do I have that right?
Govt messing in business can kill innovation. But allowing a company to act badly is not OK.
Splitting MS made sense to me. How much innovation has their monopolist practices killed? ( answer, lots )
But I hardly think that MS is important enough to crash markets or stall the economy.
Someone else would have picked up the slack(ware).