AT&T's 'Expansion' of 1 Gbps to 100 Cities is a Big, Fat Bluff

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATTs-Expansion-of-1-Gbps-to-100-Cities-is-a-Big-Fat-Bluff-128628

by lelf • 12 years ago

108 43 12 years ago

ceautery• 12 years ago

I hear it's actually going to be 1.21 Jigga-bps.

dm22• 12 years ago

I had an AT&T salesman come to my door just a few days ago to try and sell me their new "fiber" they had just installed in my area (I'm in a large city mentioned in the article), telling me all of the benefits of having fast internet. I had to lie and tell him I didn't own a TV in order to get him to stop talking about the 300 channel TV/internet bundle.

When I finally squeezed the actual speed of it out of him the answer was 18 Mbps, for $60 a month (of course he could get me a special deal of $40 for the first 3 months, which is the same deal as on their website).

I've used them before (AT&T Uverse) and they require an ATT router/modem, for an additional fee of course, even though using their hardware is technically completely unnecessary.

I actually told him that Time Warner was currently cheaper and more reliable than what he was offering, which is true unfortunately.

AT&T is a joke.

xhrpost• 12 years ago

They run fiber to their Uverse nodes and then apparently tell their salespeople to sell this as a feature. I remember one telling me the benefits of a "fiber optic signal" somehow going to my house over copper. I still ended up switching later on since they're cheaper than my local cable provider, though network performance doesn't seem to be as good.

JonFish85• 12 years ago

Maybe they're using Monster cables, for a better digital signal? (Kidding, hopefully obviously)

cones688• 12 years ago

benefits of a "fiber optic signal" somehow going to my house over copper

This is what is sold in the UK a lot, its called fibre to the cabinet (FTC) and does indeed make a difference, if your cabinet is on the street corner (100m) that beats the 1 mile maybe to the actual exchange as a lot of internet speed is dictated by the decay one gets with copper signals.

[0] http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html

deelowe• 12 years ago

And since it's uverse, you get >=30ms instant latency YAY!

wmf2• 12 years ago

AT&T's door-to-door salespeople told me that my 30-year-old single-family house in Austin will be eligible for GigaPower in the summer, so maybe it's not quite as bad as the article says.

Charging $30/month to not spy on me is bullshit, though.

fsckin• 12 years ago

I would happily move to get faster internet speeds, but all of the neighborhoods AT&T are targeting seemed to be expensive when I checked them out.

This jives w/ what the article says:

>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.

On the other hand, Google Fiber seems to be planning connectivity all over the place, since they're tasked w/ providing free service to various community hubs selected by the city which are widely spread out.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

In short, if your city plays nice and gives AT&T what they want legislatively (namely gut consumer protections requiring they keep serving DSL users they don't want so they can focus on more profitable wireless)

I think the author is being hypocritical in holding this against AT&T while ignoring the fact that Google is only rolling out fiber in cities that agree to basically leave them alone from regulatory standpoint. And while the author complains about AT&T not upgrading legacy DSL users, you don't exactly see Google or anyone else going after that "lucrative" market.[1] You don't see Google, or anyone else, jockeying to offer service in cities with insane build-out requirements.

The author, Karl Bode, clearly understands why nobody wants to roll out these services: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Baltimore-Still-Begging-V... ("Baltimore is one of many cities who simply want somebody to come in and provide better broadband service, but don't offer an attractive enough return on the investment for any large, investor-forcused private company to bother.") That's true for Google as much as it's true for AT&T. Google's ability to cross-subsidize with its advertising business changes the numbers a bit, but at scale, that's the bottom line.

That said, I think Google Fiber adds a lot of value. I don't think they're going to shame AT&T/Verizon into doing deployments that don't yield an attractive return on capital. It may have the more important effect of putting municipalities on notice that if they want fiber, from anyone, they need to cut the strings attached.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

Google comes across as a hero because the end result is cheap and fast internet access.

AT&T and Google both play the regulatory game but AT&T ends up gouging their consumers and not delivering on advertised speeds.

wmf2• 12 years ago

Is Google Fiber actually cheap or is it just passing on their regulatory savings to customers?

ryoshu• 12 years ago

The $200 Billion Rip-off: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

The telcos have already promised to lay fiber, received concessions for it, and delivered little to nothing. Google may start ripping off taxpayers like that, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until I see it.

jessaustin5• 12 years ago

I'm sometimes amazed how otherwise competent adults take seriously anything that ATT or VZN say. It takes a tabula that is particularly rasa to just ignore the last three or four decades of behavior from these rascals. It's actually much more likely that they'll orchestrate another "rip-off", except for more money, than that Google will ever do anything even approaching that.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

The $200 billion figure doesn't represent real money that changed hands. It's an estimate based on taking the actual profit margin of the telecom companies since deregulation in 1996, and calling everything over 9-10% to be "excess profits." The premise is that telcos "promised" to lay fiber in return for being deregulated, and that if their profit margins had been limited to rates typical of a regulated utility, they would've made a lot less money.

Of course, it's easy to play this game with any company. Google's profit margin is over 20%. According to this reasoning, every year Google is "ripping off" the public to the tune of $6 billion. Obviously it's ridiculous to just pick a number as the "right" profit margin for an industry and call everything above that number "excess profits." But that's precisely the premise underlying the $200 billion "rip off."

There was no "rip off." The premise of the 1996 reform was that deregulation of the industry would create an incentive for companies to invest private capital. And that has proven true. Over the last two decades, telecom and cable companies have been among those with the highest capital expenditures. What happened is that nobody predicted wireless would become such a big deal. So instead of going into fiber, all that money was invested in wireless instead. That's the major reason why fiber deployment never really materialized--spending that money on wireless made a lot more sense.

And from a consumer standpoint, it still mostly does. I don't even have internet service at my house--but I've got two different LTE subscriptions.

FireBeyond• 12 years ago

Google does do this, but is also not an entrenched monopoly. They’re only -adding- to the competition in those cities.

mathattack• 12 years ago

Is it really a bluff (something they won't do) or just hype? If it's hype, who cares?

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I've already seen some sites like TheVerge falling for AT&T's BS, and just parroting their press release. I don't know why anyone would take what a company like AT&T is saying for granted. You should be doing the opposite of that and question everything they're saying.

ulfw• 12 years ago

The definition of vaporware. Powered by at&t

daigoba66• 12 years ago

ATT UVerse is the one of the biggest disappointments I've faced as a consumer.

When Verizon FIOS first came about I was super excited. And then I learned that since my town is part of ATT-land, I'm forever locked out of obtaining it.

A few years later ATT announces UVerse (fiber-to-the-home) in select markets. Again I'm super excited, and I anxiously await the day it's available for my street.

Years later that day finally comes. Only then do I realize that they have since re-branded their entire DSL product line as "UVerse". So all ATT customers can get UVerse, great! But only a very select few will actually get fiber-to-the-home.

What a load of crap.

sureshv• 12 years ago

Most of UVerse is FTTN, after which it is VDSL2 to the premise site; hence bandwidths that are 24Mbps at most. I have U-Verse and get around 18Mbps at most but since the line is shared with their TV service it can drop down from there.

earlz• 12 years ago

This article is spot on. I've had countless reps try to sell me on U-Verse "It's fiber to your neighborhood, so it's faster"! My next question is of course "How fast?" "Well, you can get up to 18mbit/s".. I have faster than that with cable. wtf

That's not to even mention their HORRIBLE modems that they force you to use after migrating to U-Verse. Search for "nvg510" and you'll see how happy your service will be afterwards, assuming they aren't using old unreliable DSL pairs that make it so your specific house can only get 6mbit or 1.5mbit, despite your neighbor getting 16mbit

Oh, and also in my city you can't even buy just U-Verse internet. you have to buy into their crap "digital" (another word for heavily MPEG compressed) TV service

ilyanep• 12 years ago

Yup. I had to specifically buy another router to use with the modem because the U-Verse default routers don't even let you set custom DNS servers and AT&Ts were significantly slowing my connection.

hkarthik• 12 years ago

I live in an area of suburban Dallas, TX where the city and telcos laid fiber over 7 years ago. U-verse has always been capped for us. I'm hoping we get on the list for Gigapower but any attempts to get information on this have been futile. Local reps know nothing about Gigapower and emails to corporate get no response.

I had such a poor experience with Uverse when it first came out that it made even TWC internet look significantly better so I've stuck with Time Warner.

johnohara• 12 years ago

The recently deployed AT&T fiber infrastructure for U-Verse is first class and very well built. It will handle 1Gbps+ when it needs to.

But not over CAT-3 neighborhood wiring.

The fact is nobody, not AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or anyone else, is eager to deploy fiber to each home's "de-marc." It's expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.

The last mile is a good place for municipalities to get involved, possibly under some form of revenue sharing plan with the carriers.

iOsyss• 12 years ago

AT&T has made it their goal to trick the average consumer by having their reps go around telling everyone in Austin they now have fiber in their area!

The reps won't even give the speed of the line until asked and the majority of responses when asked are Download Speeds of 15-30Mbps. Time Warner has cable options doubling this and the price is better.

AT&T is basically trying to confuse their customers before google fiber hits Austin and it's the most immoral thing I've seen in a long time.

bradknowles• 12 years ago

I live in Austin, and I have had U-Verse for months. I've got ~40Mbps down, and that's pretty reliable and with low latency.

I had AT&T sales reps come by the house a few weeks ago to try and sell me U-Verse, and I was able to tell them more about my service that I already had than they were told to offer to anyone else in my neighborhood.

The only thing they had to hook me on was TV, and I told them we were getting rid of all TV service.

And no, I didn't really feel sorry for them at all. Three nice young people out for a neighborhood walk where they will probably make a years worth of sales commissions in just a few hours. They don't deserve any pity or sympathy from me.

gonzo• 12 years ago

I live in Austin, TX.

I have Grande and AT&T fiber to my home.

AT&T will not sell me their (current 300Mbps, future 1Gbps) service.

Grande will.

When Google Fiber arrives in my neighborhood, I'll probably keep both Grande and Google. (Because it makes for an excellent test of pfSense, and as co-owner of the company behind pfSense, I'm into testing it.)

AT&T's 'Expansion' of 1 Gbps to 100 Cities is a Big, Fat Bluff

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