AT&T Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists (techdirt.com) 91
An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechDirt points out that AT&T's big fiber deployment project isn't yet adding up to much. They posted a press release last week saying how they've launched fiber internet in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, and how they also plan to bring it to 38 other metro areas. But TechDirt notes a few parts they left out: "Nowhere does the company state when these connections will be delivered. Similarly nowhere does the company make clear that it's targeting mostly high-end housing developments where fiber is already in the ground, making costs negligible (the only way you could technically accomplish a deployment of this kind and magically have your CAPEX consistently drop). And while AT&T claims these improvements will reach 14 million residential and commercial locations, AT&T gives no timeline for this accomplishment. That means it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so. "
Headline (Score:3, Insightful)
"Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists "
Thats why thyre building it, becausr it doesn't exist (yet)
Or did I miss something?
Re: (Score:1)
This is all part of the 'new journalism' of 'weaving a story from the facts', aka learning exactly how to compromise one's integrity dollar-for-dollar and/or word-for-word.
Re: (Score:1)
but what does the fox say? hmmmmm
For real in Durham, NC (Score:2, Interesting)
Shortly after Google announced the decision to install their fiber in Raleigh-Durham area, AT&T planted the big orange conduit, then the black fiber bundles all over our neighborhoods this past summer (mostly standalone houses, about "middle income"). I even had to roll an empty cable spool out of my yard down the street to where some of their equipment was parked for a while.
U-Verse became available shortly thereafter - had an AT&T guy come to our door to offer it. Some neighbors have gotten it,
Re:Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
you don't know how hard this is (Score:3)
why, it will take until the FCC crawls their back, and about 6-8 months longer, to meet their goals. seriously. it's just so hard when it's only for money, not for a reason to still live.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The telcos have have over $2 billion from our tax money to build these new networks. They're not doing it, or are doing it so slow, they'll take centuries to complete.
It's time they returned our money. Anyone else would be persecuted for not delivering after being paid. Perhaps it's time for CEOs and the boards to do some hard-time.
Re:Headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind of like the $9 billion they took in the 00's to provide rural broadband to the country.
They just pocketed it and did basically nothing.
Exactly--Fraud on the taxpayers (Score:2)
Kind of like the $9 billion they took in the 00's to provide rural broadband to the country.
They just pocketed it and did basically nothing.
Almost certainly *exactly* like that. They're probably doing it to pick up money they've gotten from the public through Congress, most likely in the term of tax breaks. It turns out that when you call something a "tax cut," the public usually doesn't notice when Congress gives a company or industry a couple of billion dollars from the public's taxes.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
See, they're not building very much, but they're using it to claim how they'd be forced to stop spending money on improving their infrastructure if those pesky regulators made them follow any rules.
It's more like they're picking the low hanging fruit along the side of a road, but are claiming to be building orchards and highways.
They're dinosaurs sitting on a business model by which they keep charging more money for the same thing, while ultimately NOT investing in new infrastructure and instead acting like they deserve money for doing nothing.
What you're missing is they're not really building it. They're adding a small amount of capacity in places where it is super easy and to do it because someone already built the infrastructure, and then pretending they're some kind of cutting edge innovators of the network of the future.
So, just how much of the money they've collected and said it's for improving infrastructure has actually been used to that end, and how much has just been skimmed off as profits to ensure the stock stays high and executive bonuses keep going up?
When they don't invest in real infrastructure and adding new capacity, it's just a shell game to pretend they're not just leaving the existing stuff to rot.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you've missed the even-more-sinister plot afoot. By announcing their intent to build a network, they're sowing confusion among under-served communities that have been considering building their own networks. The cities that have already built their own municipal networks have been extremely happy with them; they cost far less than a private network, and service is much more responsive than with the big network providers. The experiences are so good that more and more cities are considering them.
Wireless networks are a better investment (Score:2)
Telecoms are investing in wireless networks over fiber because when the next generation of wireless mobile internet (5G) comes, it will move data faster at speeds competitive with land-based cable/DSL/Fiber, so selling those land-based internet services will get harder. Consider that 4G LTE can already move data fast enough to accommodate basic internet use (e.g. web browsing, email, basic streaming) and 5G will be faster without laying and maintaining expensive cables all over the planet. For rural areas i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
as long as you are in the shadow of the DSLAM (Score:2)
things are different when the wiring in the ground is cat-3 at best, and might be lead/paper/steel in the heart of downtown.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed
My Verizon FIOS [verizon.com] service begs to differ. So do the lucky folks with Google Fiber [google.com]. In fact, when I used to have DSL my 10+ meg connection was on par with the local cable provider's speeds -- without the terrible latency at peak times that my cable-subscribed neighbors experienced.
Your statements might be colored by a poor experience with DSL. Some installations are better than others -- it seems to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood issue. It's obvious you've never had fiber of any type, and you don't ev
Re: (Score:2)
l. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.
That may be true on average, but I've got fiber to my house and I get 940 Mbps+ up and down from AT&T GigaPower for the last year.
I was skeptical, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen quite a bit of Fiber To The Press Release, but here in the RTP area of North Carolina, they're digging like crazy. Our decidedly-not-upscale neighborhood has already received the doorknob hang-tabs about excavation, and the Miss Utility painters have been around.
Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments, although they seem to have put things on hold until the new year.
I'm unimpressed with AT&T's advertising, monitoring and capping policies, but they're already having a positive effect -- last time I threatened to drop TWC, they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is easy to understand why the cost of running that fiber in an existing neighborhood makes the margins pretty slim. They have to promise the world to get their mergers and acquisitions. Seems they only have to delive
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
... they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.
For anyone who wants some perspective on internet pricing in other parts of the US. I'm in Western New York (Buffalo), paying the same company, Time Warner, $65 a month for 25/10 (burst) with the only form of competition being Verizon ADSL which although it is in my area, it is not actually available where I live, nor is it adequate for my needs. My office was paying about $150 a month for 35/10 (burst) and one static IP in a slightly more rural area until we switched to nearly $400 month for 10/10 (dedicat
Re: (Score:2)
I've had AT&T U-verse, Verizon FIOS, Comcast and TWC cable.
Comcast has always sucked, it's great when it works but is so flaky you can't even rely on it for home use, at least where I was. I think a finch landing on the cable would knock it out.
TWC was better, but when it rained, well, see Comcast's finch report.
U-verse in their FTTH (fiber all the way to the box on mounted to my house) was initially awesome in the days of DSL, but was so oversubscribed in my area after a few years that you could not
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, that was about the boat we were in before Google announced -- we do also have TWC, but that didn't motivate Frontier to offer anything beyond 6/1 DSL (except the FttPR deployment I mention downthread).
I can only hope that Google finds a way to profit on widespread deployment. Their announcement here has really lit a fire under everyone. As a result, AT&T and TWC are moving, and Frontier is probably shriveling to ash.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's not AT&T, AT&T will probably want to find out who has been hanging tags on our doorknobs notifying us about the excavation, and using the AT&T GigaPower logo.
Even the mid-range neighborhoods around here harbor a lot of tech workers. We're lucky enough to be a big, tempting target.
Frontier, the ILEC we're saddled with, deployed its own FttPR effort a year or two ago. I think they've hooked up an office complex or two, and one residential development where I don't think anyone's even start
Re: (Score:2)
> Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments...
1) Are you sure it's ATT doing the excavation?
2) This is the only reason ATT would *actually* be laying fiber to such a down-scale place as yours. ATT makes money hand-over-fist on their Capex expenditures from way back in the 1980's and 1990's. Why would they want to increase those Capex costs just to give you faster service? (Hint: They don't.)
Right now it's way cheaper in long term to install fiber for Repair/Upgrades then Capex
FttPR (Score:5, Funny)
My street is getting it right now . . . (Score:2)
Another characteristic of my neighborhood is that it seems to be a logical location to be the next batch of Google fiberhood sign-up areas. . .
Looks like ATT is moving at "chicken with head cut-off" speed these days. . . (at least from my perspective)
What is the solution? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not about what should be done, it's about calling companies out on drumming up interest out of words that do not necessarily promise anything.
This is actually refreshing to see someone call out a company for making nice sounding announcements devoid of any meaningful way to evaluate their actual performance against their press release promises. It's something almost every company does and has done for a long time. Particularly as lazy journalism has allowed corporate press releases to be little more
Screw AT&T (Score:2, Insightful)
They yanked my chain for 7 years teasing us with UVerse. It finally came and was teh same shitty 3.0/.384 speeds that their DSL was. Charter finally ran cables down my street and I got hooked up this last weekend. Went from 3 down to 66 down. And dropped $5/month (after the initial signup deal expires!) from my bill.
AT&T is a shit company that can't die fast enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Trying to Appear to Keep Up with Google Fiber (Score:2)
That's all... nothing else to see here...
Competition (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
( I'm pretty sure you don't have any spare single mode fiber laying about the house, nor the hardware to interface with the carrier hardware )
You must be new here. You'd be surprised what some of us have in our basements. I'd be shocked if nobody here had the appropriate equipment. I know I have a good length of fiber left over that somehow made it all the way to Maine when I moved. I doubt it's any good, it's probably been bent too much to be of any value.
However, I've got like racks in my basement. I have a whole server "closet" that's actually pretty huge. I've even got an inbound call router should I ever want to set up my own dial-up ISP. No
They did for me. (Score:2)
Re:They did for me. (Score:5, Informative)
A guy from AT&T knocked on my door and said the same thing. "Really? Sweet! I've been waiting for ages." I took him into my backyard and said "Show me where." I don't have an alley and everything is aerial, so for them to bury fiber in the backyard would be a pain in the ass and waaaaay more expensive than just hanging it on the poles. He looked around on the ground for peds anyway, didn't see any, then stared up at the poles with a confused look on his face. "See that? *points* That's a 50 pair copper cable running down those poles serving my street and the street over there *waves*. That terminal there *points* feeds the copper drops going to those four *points* houses. The cable above that *points* is Charter's cable, and then I really hope you know that those cables up top *waves* are power lines. So tell me.. where's your fiber?"
He stood silent for a few seconds and said "I apologize for disturbing you sir" and walked off.
From my days as a premise tech for Uverse I'm 99% certain he was a contractor paid to sell door to door. They like to bend the "truth" that fiber does, indeed, serve a DSLAM somewhere in your neighborhood so therefore you have fiber service. However, I'm not paying AT&T's prices for bonded pair VDSL on old aerial cable to get 45 megs with bandwidth caps when I can get 60 megs from Charter with no bandwidth caps for less. If and/or when AT&T actually does run fiber down my poles, I'm pretty sure I'll notice, and I'll decide if the cost is worth the megabits and limitations then.
Re: (Score:2)
They tried that with me about two years ago.
My response? Sweet, what kind of speeds are you offering now?
We offer up to 20Mbps dow..
At that point I just quickly closed the door and walked away.
Re: (Score:1)
Centurylink pulls the same crap here.
Building in chicagoland (Score:2)
They are Building in chicagoland.
Seen a lot of trucks and new cables being ran. I hope they move me from copper (under ground) to fiber. In a newer area then some of the non under ground area they are building in. Just down the road.
Promises (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier. They want you to use cell for internet. They want to build more cell towers. It's a business decision.
You can fuck off troll.
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize AT&T is in name only. The company was SBC. SBC changed its name to AT&T. Look it up sometime.
Well, no. The bell co was split up into the multitude of bells. Now they are reforming into the bell co again. What you know as AT&T today and what you formerly knew as SBC also includes other bells, like Pacific Bell. And SBC and Pacific Bell were already themselves conglomerates of smaller bells. AT&T is as good a name as anything; arguably, they should just call themselves the Bell Company again, because that's what they are again. They cover most of the households in the USA.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They are not completely reformed back together. From what was originally AT&T has split into 3 nowadays AT&T, Qwest and Verizon http://subjunctive.net/klog/20 [subjunctive.net]...
Right, but AT&T has more land lines than either of those other guys. That's why cable and fiber have them puckered more than anyone else. DSL is relevant to them. Verizon has more retail wireless customers than AT&T, so if the land line goes away, Verizon is more powerful than AT&T...
Re: (Score:2)
Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier.
Fortunately, they ran it in my neighborhood before they figured that out. And then they sold their POTS/Fiber system to Frontier. I held out for a few years with ClearWire WiMax until Sprint went tits up and pulled the plug. So I switched to FIOS. The installation went well, particularly since I pulled a Cat 5 cable to the location of the network interface. The technician was quite happy about not having to crawl through another attic dragging a cable.
One little complaint: The NID has battery backup. But e
Re: (Score:2)
AT&T sent me a letter (Score:2)
Yeah... meanwhile in Tennessee (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you stepped in some Poe [wikipedia.org]. You might want to check your shoes.
Re: (Score:1)
Fibernets Of Unusual Size? (Score:2)
I don't think they exist.