AT&T's Gigabit Smokescreen 129
Yesterday AT&T announced it would examine 100 cities and municipalities in the U.S., including 21 metropolitan areas, for introduction of gigabit fiber. Taken on its face, the announcement is the company's response to Google Fiber. But many were quick to note AT&T has promised nothing. Karl Bode at DSLReports went so far as to call AT&T's announcement a giant bluff.
"Ever since Google Fiber came on the scene, AT&T's response has been highly theatrical in nature. What AT&T would have the press and public believe is that they're engaged in a massive new deployment of fiber to the home service. 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. It's not. At the same time AT&T is promising a massive expansion in fixed line broadband, they're telling investors they aren't spending much money on the initiative, because they aren't. AT&T's focus is on more profitable wireless. 'Gigapower' is a show pony designed to help the company pretend they're not being outmaneuvered in their core business by a search engine company."
And all this after we have paid them to do it... (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T has already been given Billions of dollars in tax incentives [techdirt.com] to deliver fiber optic cable based internet to your house.
According to the incentive plans these high speed internet connections should already be installed and functioning for pretty much every American at speeds averaging 45 Mbps upload and download. Every American taxpayer, that is not a provider of internet infrastructure, has taken on the burden of $2000.00 more in taxes in order to offset the incentives gives to AT&T and the baby bells.
Do you have your low cost, high speed fiber yet?
Re:And what's Google *promising*? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:cherry pick profitable areas (Score:5, Informative)
Like Google isn't doing the same thing. They announce years in advance and do nothing but cherry pick profitable areas. How many actual subscribers are in Google's territory?
Sorry, but I live in the hood and have google fiber, and my friends live in an even worse area (near 37th and Prospect) and also have google fiber. They aren't just cherry picking the nice areas.
I can order "Giga" power... but havent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it.. (Score:2, Informative)
You've linked to a poor source that gets its data from even worse sources.
AT&T is only worth $189 billion as of today. So what did they do with that $200 billion they supposedly got? Set it on fire? I dislike AT&T as much as the next guy, but let not create flat out lies.
Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it.. (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T was given billions of dollars to deliver broadband based on at least one leg of fiber to at least one home in each census tract in the subsidized area.
My census tract has ONE subdivision where AT&T vDSL is available (DSL from a fiber-fed, single-shelf, 4-card VRAD hosting 192 homes), yet AT&T is legally allowed to shade in the entire census tract (over 2000 homes) on the map and tell government that "this census tract has fiber coverage per our agreement."
The only reason 192 homes have access is because that maximizes revenue for the smallest VRAD they install on the lowest-provision fiber feed.
Re:Applause for Google (Score:4, Informative)
They are worlds better than the Cable company.... I used to be down for days with the cable provider because somebody on my block insisted on handing out DHCP addresses for some reason. Their tech support guys couldn't seem to figure out who it was. I finally got tired of them and jumped on FiOS when it first came out.
My connection has been rock solid since. I've had maybe 3 outages that where not my fault in 8 years, and two of those where because of the cheap router the provided was too unstable. I just went and got my own hardware and ditched that horrible Actiontec junk.
However, they are the absolute most expensive for the bandwidth you get. They filter/firewall residential DHCP service to keep you from running servers (http, https, ftp etc) but they don't tell you this directly. Also, they have pretty crappy traffic management so even though I pay for 25/25Mbps connection, I can pretty much count on only getting that when speed checking on their servers. Any real traffic can never approach that, even in aggregate.
So I don't recommend Verizon very highly either. Even if it is the lesser of the various evils available to me.
Re:Applause for Google (Score:4, Informative)
you can port that number to anything of your choosing :)
google voice is especially nice, since you can make your phone carrier a commodity via forwarding. IE: port primary number to google voice, get burner/landline whatever, and then just have google voice forward your primary number to whatever number you get from the new provider. it breaks caller-ID and confuses people regarding your callback number, but it's a small price to pay.
Small anecdote: I was using straighttalk wireless, and had an issue with their soviet era website (I have zero patience for companies that make it difficult for me to pay my bill.. seriously, i'm fucking trying to give you my money.. ). So, thanks to call forwarding I was able to drop them post-haste and switch to a different provider without losing a beat (or worrying about notifying people of a number change.).