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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...
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.
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.
The study comes from the UC Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, which hosts a yearly "Othering & Belonging" conference.
So, yes.
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?
My cable internet still works when power is out and i get 10x faster speeds then AT&T crap option where i live.
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
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...
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Poor people paid most of the taxes that put fiber in those rich neighborhoods.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the exact opposite of true. At least at a national level (Federal income tax), the top 16% of earners (those will incomes of $100K or above) account for 79.4% of all the individual tax revenue paid to the government. In fact, the top 1% of earners account for 51.6% of the IRS individual tax revenue all by themselves. Maybe taxes in California are radically different, but I doubt it.
"95% of all Slashdot
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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