7 ms·

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

108 points by lelf 13y ago

ceautery 13y ago
I hear it's actually going to be 1.21 Jigga-bps.
dm2 13y 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.
- deelowe 13y ago
  And since it's uverse, you get >=30ms instant latency YAY!
- xhrpost 13y 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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - JonFish85 13y ago
    Maybe they're using Monster cables, for a better digital signal? (Kidding, hopefully obviously)
    - deeviant 13y ago
      Nay, ATT would need 2x the GDP of the entire universe to acquire enough Monster Cable for that.
  - cones688 13y 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 http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html
wmf 13y 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 13y 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.
rayiner 13y 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-Verizon-for-FiOS-123588 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.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  Google does do this, but is also not an entrenched monopoly. They’re only -adding- to the competition in those cities.
- Igglyboo 13y 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.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Is Google Fiber actually cheap or is it just passing on their regulatory savings to customers?
higherpurpose 13y 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 13y ago
The definition of vaporware. Powered by at&t
daigoba66 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ilyanep 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.)

108 points by lelf 13y ago

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

dm2 13y 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.

deelowe 13y ago
And since it's uverse, you get >=30ms instant latency YAY!
xhrpost 13y 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- JonFish85 13y ago
  Maybe they're using Monster cables, for a better digital signal? (Kidding, hopefully obviously)
  - deeviant 13y ago
    Nay, ATT would need 2x the GDP of the entire universe to acquire enough Monster Cable for that.
- cones688 13y 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 http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html

wmf 13y 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 13y 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.

rayiner 13y 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-Verizon-for-FiOS-123588 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.

FireBeyond 13y ago
Google does do this, but is also not an entrenched monopoly. They’re only -adding- to the competition in those cities.
Igglyboo 13y 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.
- wmf 13y ago
  Is Google Fiber actually cheap or is it just passing on their regulatory savings to customers?

higherpurpose 13y 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 13y ago

The definition of vaporware. Powered by at&t

daigoba66 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ilyanep 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.)