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AT&T Brings Fiber To Rich Areas While the Rest Are Stuck On DSL, Study Finds (arstechnica.com)
According to a new study from UC Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, AT&T has been focused on deploying fiber-to-the-home in the higher-income neighborhoods of California, giving wealthy people access to gigabit internet while others are stuck with DSL internet that doesn't even meet state and federal broadband standards. Ars Technica reports: California households with access to AT&T's fiber service have a median income of $94,208, according to "AT&T's Digital Divide in California," in which the Haas Institute analyzed Federal Communications Commission data from June 2016. The study was funded by the Communications Workers of America, an AT&T workers' union that's been involved in contentious negotiations with the company. By contrast, the median household income is $53,186 in California neighborhoods where AT&T provides only DSL, with download speeds typically ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps. At the low end, that's less than 1 percent of the gigabit speeds offered by AT&T's fiber service. The median income in areas with U-verse VDSL, which ranges from 12Mbps to 75Mbps, is $67,021. In 4.1 million California households, representing 42.8 percent of AT&T's California service area, AT&T's fastest speeds fell short of the federal broadband definition of 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads, the report said.
who would have tought
They'll go where the money is.
That's the proper way to run a business.
Rich people also drive Teslas, were the first to have HDTV and before that, the first to have home computers.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
wouldn't it make sense for them to deploy where people will buy their product especially when it is substantially more expensive product. and with the bonus of monetizing the usage data of high net-worth individuals who are probably a the target demographic of their advertising overlords...
Let me guess, gigabit internet is another "right" to which all people must have access. Tax money must be appropriated so in effect rich people will pay for it anyway. Conservatives will decry the higher tax rates and deficit spending, liberals will accuse conservatives of hating the poor.
The endless circle of American politics. Or more like a death spiral in 3D.
Is the DSL at least reliable? If so, I'll take it!
DSL versus fiber versus gerbils carrying pebbles with 1's and 0's on them make diddly squat difference if it's not reliable.
Damn oligopolies make one have to choose between Dumb and Dumber.
Table-ized A.I.
$90K is poor in places like San Francisco and parts of SoCal. If you're living out in the sticks in a place like Manteca or Bakersfield, it's not poor.
News at 11 and you won't believe what we found!!!!!!!!!
Why wouldn't they invest where it would be fiscally beneficial to do so? It's a business, not a charity ... Is this some more social justice warrior snowflake baiting?
The officers of a corporation have a (legal) duty to maximize long term shareholder value. Not building where there is no clear ROI is not only the right choice, it is a duty.
If one wants to blame someone, blame the politicians who are so enamored of competition that they do not require that upgrades be available to everyone within a limited time period. Allowing cherry-picking results in cherry-picking.
This is such a stupid article. Seems to incite flame, but it's like stating: Rolex builds stores in affluent shopping centers only, study finds.
So? Gigabit internet costs more than DSL, and it costs more to build out. So if they go to where there are a high number of subscribers who can likely afford it, they are more likely to recoup the buildout investment, and the service then won't die off. Otherwise the headline would read: AT&T kills off GPON service due to low subscriber rates.
The rich get the product first, lowering the N'th's cost and so by making it more affordable for the products to be moved down market. Everyone knows this.
when all fails. power out? DSL. lines down? DSL. my neighbors love me. well, my wife does too, but they love her as well.
I was just bitching not more than 2 hours ago about how ATT only has fiber service in the dumpy part of town, but not out here.
Im not rich, mind you but I live inland on a peninsula of a very large lake, so while I personally am not rich, there's some sickeningly big ass lake houses just down the road
With ADSL, you can upgrade one CO and spread the costs among rich AND poor areas. With VDSL2, your meaningful service area is about 1,000 feet... and deploying a new VRAD in an area without existing fiber within a mile or so isn't cheap. Unless they can find enough rich people within a thousand feet who can't get service through an existing VRAD, those poor areas aren't going to get faster service.
God, it hurts defending AT&T... but even if they were actively benevolent, VDSL2's short range makes it really hard to cost-effectively serve poor areas UNLESS those poor areas have lots of people willing and able to buy premium internet service.
Going back to the rural electrification argument, yes, you can force the power company to provide you with power almost anywhere adjacent to a public road or right-of-way... but if you decide to build an Aluminum-smelting plant in the middle of nowhere (Aluminum-smelting uses a STAGGERING amount of power), you can't legally (or reasonably) expect the power company to upgrade 100+ miles of wiring for free, even if they WOULD provide you with up to 500A service for free.
The best way California can get Uverse into poor neighborhoods? Find all the properties in the area owned by the city/county/state due to unpaid liens, and offer one per ~2,000 feet to AT&T for free (waiving those liens) as a neighborhood VRAD site. Most poor areas have vacant properties that can't be sold, because the liens exceed its value. Making some of them available to AT&T as VRAD sites would make it easier for AT&T to justify the cost of deploying 50mbps+ VDSL2 into those areas.
Wish I could get DSL. Been begging AT&T for fifteen years to install it here in this rural area. So whining about having "only" DSL seems like a first world problem.
The thing is, telecom companies don't operate in the same environment as Rolex or (as suggested above) Tesla.
First of all, Rolex or Tesla won't refuse to sell you their products if you come along with cash just because of your address.
Secondly, and most importantly, those companies don't get massive subsidies from taxpayers to provide services to all, not just a privileged few.
Finally, if you are looking at Tesla or other products in their initial phase, there is certainly a time when the costs are high and they drop as adoption rates increase, but at this time, GPON is well established technology. Costs are not likely to drop very much.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
maybe not so stupid when you consider how many hundreds of millions of dollars AT&T was given to build out better than DSL service to underserved and rural areas. And just where did all that money go?
Here in the San Francisco bay area, AT&T has been running an ad for the last couple months or so on one of those electronic billboards advertising gigabit fiber service. Well, if they're actually offering it somewhere on the peninsula, I have no idea where, because every time I check on their site, they claim it's not yet available in my area, despite the fact that I've seen their trucks running around the area apparently putting up new cabling of some sort. Google seems to have gotten bored with Google Fiber, so I'm not holding my breath for them anymore. In fact, the only ISP I know is offering gigabit fiber service in the bay area is Sonic.net, in a very slow, limited roll-out.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"Throw out the burdensome regulations that shackle corporations that are dying to provide a better internet to all! Especially those regulations that require a modern internet be equal (net neutrality) and available to all - kill 'em! They're standing in the way of profit growth.. I mean, market forces that would provide a faster internet for everyone."
"Look... Let's be real.. if those nigg&&cough^^cough^^hack$##... poor people could just afford to pay for it, it'd be there already..."
As much as it makes sense in a perfect, ivory towered world to get rid of seemingly superfluous or harmful regulations, the real world needs government-backed regulations with teeth. Yes, many regulations are not fair nor ideal, and they definitely create resistance against efficiency. But they are the only thing that keeps a lid on the real world problems that are ultimately based in greed and soulless profit motive by companies that are way too large for the world's own good.
Wealthy areas generally have newer housing which would be easier to service. Older buildings are harder to connect with the last mile of fiber. It is coincidental that the older buildings, on average, are occupied by people with a lower median income. What would be interesting is if instead of using median income to generate the statistics, the age of the infrastructure was used. There will be pockets of expensive old houses which could clarify things. If they get fiber access despite being hard to provide then there might be cause for concern.
This problem has already been solved by Cooperatives
But even Cooperatives have trouble. The cost to provision a dwelling for fiber ranges from $3,000 to $12,000 and large fiber build-outs or build-overs are not likely to happen without a government subsidy.
Verizon FiOS is not building fiber anymore because it just doesn't make economic sense to. Verizon will not see dime one of profit for another 10 years on their FiOS plants. Remember, they cut bait and sold an entire region to Frontier years ago.
Fiber to the neighborhood and copper coaxial to the dwellings is perfectly sensible and astonishingly cheap with comparable speeds and latency, though not 800 MB/s speeds, which, arguably, a dwelling would have a hard time seeing that speed once the connection leaves the FiOS plant.
Kriston
There is a big difference between 'refusing to sell' and 'deciding not to invest in infrastructure' to a certain area. The 'stores' represent and investment targeted at likely customers. If they build high speed internet in poor neighborhoods, will they sign enough customers to make it worthwhile or will those people stay on lower cost existing service? If you don't know the answer (I don't) then it might be something to think about.
they got billions (with a 'b') in subsidies while _also_ being allowed to charge extra fees to bring fiber to those poor neighborhoods. They pocketed the money and told us to go fuck ourselves. Just nationalize broadband already. It costs them $9/mo (customer service included, though with AT&T I'm using the term loosely). Why the hell Americans are so obsessed with the "free" market that they let rich assholes profit off critical infrastructure is beyond me. Really, truly beyond me. I just don't understand why so many people can be so ignorant for so long in the face of so much evidence to the contrary...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
that put fiber in those rich neighborhoods. And the middle class. You don't get rich by paying for the services you depend on. That's for suckers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
GPON is well established technology. Costs are not likely to drop very much.
Don't be ridiculous! Costs are dropping and will continue to drop as the technology is deployed more to residential customers. The cost of fiber optic cable itself is going down. The cost of fiber network equipment is going down. The labor costs of installing are going down. I mean for example, when AT&T installed fiber in my neighborhood they sent a guy out to fuse the cables. Last time I talked to a tech doing an install, he told me they stopped doing that and use pre-terminated cables. It's cheaper. It's faster. Putting the cable in the ground is also getting cheaper, easier, and less labor intensive.
A follow up study to the one in the article reached a quick conclusion....
"Duh!!"
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And, pray tell...which group of people being considered here are paying the bulk of said taxes that fund said subsidies?
The wealthy neighborhoods or the Section 8 housing part of the city?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I don't know what country you live in, but in the USA, paying more taxes does not get you more votes, nor should it entitle you to more government spending.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
>"AT&T Brings Fiber To Rich Areas While the Rest Are Stuck On DSL, Study Finds "
Duh. Can you say "How is that different from Verizon?" who does the EXACT SAME THING with their FIOS fiber. Here, one better-off neighborhood has FIOS and right across the street one that is less well-off has zero access to FIOS. And it is like that all throughout the city. Verizon covered only the absolute top of the market with FIOS and left the rest to rot with 2Mb/s DSL, which is so fragile that half of it goes down every time it rains. The only alternative is Cox, who at least covers almost the entire area. Cox now plays the same games with "Introductory pricing" so you never REALLY know what prices are, and they go up, a LOT, every year.
It went the same place as the dollars given them to build out dsl when we were on analogue dial up. The bank.
There is no oversight in the program and just like the new program they just submit a paper no one reads. Any progression would have likely happened without those dollars. In my hometown we never actually had dsl. It was touted for a number of years and eventually cable internet rolled out.
My neighborhood is home to a major AT&T CO which occupies a multistory building the size of a large square block. It was once full of so many employees, they had a whole other second block of parking lots for workers. But it's all automated now. It's kind of a Mother of All COs, serving as a hub for a large number of regular COs.
This CO has ALL the latest services including fiber, video, DSL, whatever. Nobody here can get any of these services except DSL. We're a poorer neighborhood, you see. And they don't feel like offering it here would be viable.
BUT not far away, some land was cleared and a cluster of about 10 new homes went in. Those homes got fiber. To get TO those homes, to service them, they had to go past hundreds of older, established homes and neighborhoods.
AT&T wanted nothing to do with these old customers, many of whom had AT&T DSL for over a decade, closing in on two decades in a couple cases. I know, because I was one of the first DSL customers from that CO. They sent an Bellsouth installer and two trainees to watch him do it, that's how new it was. And shockingly, he could not get it done. They had to roll a second installer to make sense of the PPPOE bridge connection. That's how new DSL was at the time. Forget self install. Even the professionals could barely hack it.
So despite that long track record and despite there being a very high number of landlines still in use here, AT&T didn't want to even offer more options.
Comcast has had no such issues offering service.
Sig for hire.
That is another huge determining factor. The big cost is laying the infrastructure. The kind doesn't matter so much. So, if you are doing new deployments, fiber is more likely. The cable company here is all FTTH all the time for new build outs. However once that shit is deployed a replacement is a lot of money that you'd rather not spend. So they are less inclined to do it.
Well new developments also tend to not be low income. Usually middle and upper class is what they target. No surprise then that is where you see more of it.
There are plenty of rich neighbourhoods where I live with no fibre. The one right next to me is a good example. About 2 blocks away, and they have the same cable and DSL offerings I do in my cheap condo. Neither the telco nor cable company feels there's enough money to be made in ripping up and redoing the lines in either place, despite the fact that those houses are almost all 7 figures.
Go out in to a new subdivision though, and it is usually FTTH.
Also when they do rip things up and replace, of course they target the rich places since those people are more willing to spend the money. Offer someone low income the option of $100/month gigabit or $20/month 1.5mbit and they will likely go with the 1/5mbit. Ya it is way more per bit and annoyingly slow on the modern Internet, but it gets the job done and $80/month is a lot in the budget of someone low income.
*should* is your opinion, not a fact.
Gigabit internet costs more than DSL, and it costs more to build out.
If you now are ripping open the earth, laying a DSL line is far more expensive in the long term than laying a gigabit one, as you need to replace the DSL in a few decades any way because none of your customers will want it or be happy with it. I mean the largest part of the costs of building out the last mile is just cost connected to moving soil.
We've been paying a USF fee for longer than most of us have been alive. Yes, those underserved areas deserve to get the same high speed Internet that the posh upscale neighborhoods and new construction get. It's been paid for.
Labor might be going down, but even with these pre-termed cables, labor is the single largest piece of that capital expenditure. The cables and the other equipment costs pale in comparison.
It is amazing to see how this along with everything else is done in this country. We have put people on the moon, have the finest armies, best technology, but we cannot seem to govern ourselves, have decent health care, or solve the simple things like distribution of the internet. The government/ corporations make all the decisions on everything. The citizens get to vote every 4 years, but really have no say in the day to day managing all this unless we go to the streets and raise hell to get whatever it is we need. If you think the high speed cable line is the biggest problem in your life, I'd say the two biggest 800 lb gorillas in this country are spending on the government way more than it takes in and health care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . The people of the United States have been fighting health care costs since Theodore Roosevelt was in office. We have an enormous debt as well. I will guarantee you the two go hand in hand. We need to solve these two things, as it is getting to where we can't afford either one. And both could cause the collapse of our government. Life expectancy and birth mortality in countries with really good health care systems is way better than ours in the United States.Your own government forbids you from buying reasonably priced drugs from Canada because big Pharma wanted it that way.
No, but it *does* keep the cops from patrolling your residences unless there's a call.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Municipal fiber is the fix here. I have no idea why that approach gets so much pushback. Countries like Sweden created their entire Internet infrastructure from municipal fiber networks that were then easy to interconnect. Waiting for big greedy corps to advance service is pointless. Their sole interest is in squeezing out of the existing wires as much as possible without spending anything.
Higher income households are more likely to use a gigabit connection. Given the choice they will more likely choose the $70 gigabit over the $30-$40 DSL.
They are more likely to have tvs that can support 4k streaming. They probably have more devices that are accessing the internet at the same time(smartphones, tablets, and multiple pcs/laptops). They are also more likely to be telecommuting.
They are also less likely to intentionally share their wifi with multiple neighbors and friends.
I'll probably be labeled a shill for this, but it explains why AT&T isn't pushing very hard on FTTH deployment.
In the works is a wireless solution that will provide gigabit speeds to homes that will be MUCH cheaper to deploy than fiber can ever be. It's called Project AirGig.
The designs I've seen sit atop telephone poles and are inductive powered via the power lines.
I want to say they operate in the 39 ghz range.
It is being prepped for 5g deployment so, IF they get the design down, expect to see it in the not too distant future.
Is why they're pushing for regulation changes that would allow them to install these units atop the poles with a minimum of red tape.
Also explains why they don't want to pour billions of dollars into fiber if this is a potential solution instead.
Marketing Video: https://youtu.be/ZF09OWzv_pw
For new housing in which they are putting in new wires it makes sense to put in fibre and skip copper all together. But for most of the existing houses they just use the existing copper wires for DSL. There is no digging up to install wires so DSL is cheaper to install than fibre. That was the great thing about DSL. It reused the existing infrastructure. You just changed the line card and gave the customer a couple of filters for their phones.
The rich always gets the silver spoon. :)
But here it isn't directly govt. spending.
It is govt giving subsidies/monopolies to private business which then builds out and provides the product, i.e. higher speed networking.
The company(s) know who butters their bread and will vote them more if they provide the product, hence...the wealthier neighborhoods get the good stuff first.
And besides...who's going to have the computers and other tools/gadgets to utilize high speed pipes more...the wealthy sections of town or the section 8 section of town?
You act like it doesn't make sense. Hell, if they rolled all this out to the Section 8 parts of town first...and there isn't a lot of people buying it there because they can't afford it, or don't know what it would mean to them...the private company loses money.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
People who write these articles don't this this economycs bullshit. Don't you see, it's about justice and what's fair... I'm sure that if we tax the rich more we can give everyone gigabit broadband. sigh...:-/
Maybe the USF is only high enough to bring DSL to poor neighborhoods. Or maybe, and this is what I suspect, the USF does nothing and our attempts to subsidize universal service is a failure.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I suspect that the companies receiving the USF funds don't see it as a failure. There's probably not enough "stick" to go with that "carrot" though...
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Am I going to invest in infrastructure when I'll never recoup my investment costs because I'm building in an area where mofo's never pay their phone bill and are always in collections? I'm not going to build in rural areas, I'll never recoup my investment.
No, the cost in collections and charge-offs alone are a deterrent....they can use dialup like the rest of the plebes, or get a Boost Mobile hotspot..."Yo, dawg...where you at?".
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
What "massive subsidies" do Telco's get, and while you didn't raise this particular point why is DSL so horrible, I lived on 6MB DSL for two years it's not bad at all.
For the record I believe ALL subsidies to ALL companies should be cut immediately.
Murphy was an optimist
The cost of fiber optic cable itself is going down. The cost of fiber network equipment is going down. The labor costs of installing are going down.
And all of that pales in comparison to the costs of litigation and red tape involved in doing anything underground. That cost just seems to go up without any end in sight.
Then I met a man who had no DSL.
Some of us in rural America are stuck with dialup or Wireless (my situation)
And don't get me started on satellite Intertubes.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
It seems in Austin the only place you can get AT&T fiber is where its also possible to get google fiber.
Sure would be nice if AT&T had service maps, but then there would probably be even more pitchforks pointed in their direction.
The sane aren't the problem. It's the cliche`spouting non-thinkers that are. Although as one of the poor guys mentioned in the article, I would like to have at least a choice of ISPs in my extremely rural mountain town. ATT hasn't built ANYTHING out to here...